


Crucible

by Pavuvu



Series: A Shadow in the Valley [2]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: 2nd Person not Self Insert, Angst, Bad Medicine (DO NOT attempt), Brainwashing, Bunker Fic, Cannon Typical Violence, Drugs, Families of Choice, Friendship, Gaslighting, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Isolation, Mind Games, Non-Consensual, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Paralysis, Past sexual abuse mentioned, Psychological Torture, Starvation, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicide Attempt, Time Loop, Torture, Unreliable Narrorator, bliss, drug overdose, enemies to frenemies, rough seas ahead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:01:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23237389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pavuvu/pseuds/Pavuvu
Summary: After the world ends in a rush of fire, Rook finds himself trapped in a bunker with a man he intends to kill.It is seven long years.
Relationships: Deputy | Judge & Joseph Seed
Series: A Shadow in the Valley [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610344
Comments: 15
Kudos: 56





	1. The Bunker

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thanks for my beta Liliandoh & my dear friend Ealasaid, for their assistance in shaping this fic up into something legible.

—————

**Crucible**

—————

_I may think if you kindly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hands before I ever reach for you again._

**_The Crucible_ **

It is the distant sound of radio static that pulls you awake, pulls you harshly into reality. Ease open eyelids and find yourself in a dimly lit room, laid out on cold concrete and naked but for your underwear. Shiver away the Deja vu of waking chained to the bed frame in Dutch’s room, in Dutch’s bunker, with muscles sore with use and bullet wounds taking space on your skin.

Take account of yourself in the shedding darkness, work your mind awake in solitude, and catch yourself up to this moment. 

You remember the fight outside the Eden’s Gate Church, where Joseph Seed had stolen, drugged, and threatened you with the lives of your friends and then with their martial skills. You remember winning, just barely, as you stole your friends back and forced Seed to retreat with overwhelming numbers. You remember the bombs that fell and the mad scatter to the nearest vehicle. You remember driving and racing and speeding your way through terror, and burning, and animals that died in an instant before your eyes. You remember crashing, and it is there your mind goes kind of watery, loses track of things. You remember seeing Dutch, seeing him pull open the bunker door, you remember...Joseph? Joseph. You remember him now. Preaching to you, crowing his rightness, his correctness about the coming nuclear war. About the deaths, and the destruction, and about how so much of it was your fault.

Scoff at that and pull against the handcuffs pinning you to the bed frame, wince at the shock of pain that rolls through your shoulders, wonder why Dutch has you chained up here, why it’s you, not Joseph Seed that’s tied tight and left in the dark. 

Press your eyes closed, breathe deep against the nausea riding low in your stomach and the clock like pounding in your head. Take a moment to settle yourself; to take stock of the latest tragedy you call your body.

Lifting your head off the concrete, your eyes are immediately drawn to the thick white bandaging clinging to your thigh, your ribs, and your forearms. Take stock of the constellation of bruising that trail up your legs, marble your torso and scatter down your arms. Your left ring finger is still strapped tight to a splint, the tape holding it down gross with ground in dirt and blood.

Your arms are the most immediate offenders, trapped as they are against the bed frame, raised high above your collapsed body, they tingle painfully with blood restriction and the ends of your fingers feel puffy, swollen, and cold. 

Pull your legs under your torso with difficulty; struggle to bend the leg wrapped in bandages and groan out when the motion sends a sharp dagger of pain through our nerves and a rush of blood through the bandaging. Kneel there, propped against the metal bed frame, as you release the incline in your arms and blood rushes into your extremities, wince as your arms go pins and needles and buzz like jarred bees along your nerves. 

Swallow down the rust flavored muck in your mouth and call out with a weak voice. “Dutch?”

Regret it instantly, as the movement of your lips pulls at the thick, swollen, mess of our face and collapse on yourself as your nerves turn to fire and you can feel every fucking cell revolt. Feel the pain slither up into your eyes like a spike, feel the skin pull and tug against tight stitches, gag on the blood that fills your mouth and hack spittle onto the floor. 

Hear footsteps drawing nearer as you blink the blackness away from your eyes and wince as a hand presses itself against your shoulder. Tilt your head up and squint against the dim light “Dutch?” you slur, doing your best to speak without moving your lips, but really only succeed in buzzing the spit in your mouth. 

“No.” Seed says, and now that you’ve heard his voice, you can tell that the silhouette is all wrong. Too skinny, too gangly limbed to be Dutch.

Flinch away from him, slam your shoulders into the concrete wall behind you, and tilt your head up and away, exposing your throat yes, but all the better to avoid his questing hands as they follow you back, and run along your forehead, blooming soreness in their wake. 

“You knocked your head in the crash, Deputy.” The Father says, “Concussed yourself.”

Jerk away and bare your teeth, ignore the driving pain the motion brings. “Where’s Dutch?”

Joseph stares at you for a long moment, halo lit by the hall light, but shadowed before you. “He’s not with us. He went to gather the others from the car wreck. Never came back.” 

“Fuck off,” you hiss, “He wouldn’t just…”

Dutch wouldn’t just leave you here. Not with Joseph, not without protection. Not where Joseph could easily lock him out of his own bunker. Dutch wouldn't do it, not for the rest of your coworkers, not for them, not for those he didn't know. Didn't care for, personally, not like he did you. Wind yourself in circles as your brain follows that thought process, wind yourself and wind yourself even as the preacher regards you with an inscrutable expression. 

“He did.” Joseph says from where he has crouched before you, “I promise you, he did.” 

Snarl at him; ignore the way the tight stitches pull at your skin and blood flows down your face. Snarl and struggle against the bindings holding you down, holding you close to him. “Shut up!” you growl, “fucking let me go you psycho--”

“No,” Joseph says, standing, cutting you off before you could get a proper tirade going, “Think what you will of me, but I am not crazy. I foresaw the end of the world, and I prepared for it. That is not the mark of an insane man.”

Suck deeply at the blood and saliva in your mouth and spit at him, strike him just above his pant line, where the skin of his abdomen lays bare.

With a grimace he wipes your spit away and then smears it onto his jeans. “I know you are a stubborn man. Jacob would always complain about it. The extra little steps he had to take to keep you in line.” Joseph sighs, as if this is a great burden to him, as if you acting up is nothing more than a child misbehaving at a supermarket, “Do not make me resort to his practices Deputy. Our time together will be long, but it doesn't have to be painful.” 

He turns away then, and walks, he passes through the open door and you can hear the slow fade of his booted feet on the hard concrete before the sound of radio static overtakes the bunker once again.

—————

Watch the doorway with unwavering attention until the adrenalin in your body has settled and your wounded leg has given out beneath you. Sit in a tangled pile of limbs at the base of the surplus cot and twist your hands against the too tight cuffs constricting them. 

Lose yourself for a moment in the frantic pull and twist, and struggle of liberation until your wrists are red and the skin is rubbed raw and you are filled with the growing certainty that nothing short of dislocating your own thumb will lead to freedom. 

Contemplate it for a moment until your mind flashes to a stomach turning memory of your dislocated knee. Of the feeling of Doc Lindsay snapping it back into position, of his words about MRI’s and ligaments and permanent damage. Know without a doubt, that you cannot risk that kind of damage, not without knowing how far into the past death will reset you.

Let out a shaky breath and settle back against the concrete, stretch out your wounded leg, and take the pressure off the newly formed pain at your wrists. Lay your head against the edge of the mattress, press your cheek against the scratchy acrylic yarn and wait.

Wait and wait and wait. Count seconds by the ticking clock, out of view but not out of earshot. Try to hear past it, strain to hear the static of the radio and yearn for it to become words. Settle after an endless percussion of tick tick tick for Joseph to return, for something to end this nightmare.

Lift your head off the mattress and crush your eyes against the nausea that rises within you with that movement, swallow back the sudden influx of spit that preludes vomiting and struggle against the urge. Don't trust Joseph to clean the mess if you were to throw up; don’t trust him to do much of anything for you really. 

The bandages wrapping your wounds were bled through and old long before you returned to consciousness. Oversight on his part maybe...a lack of supplies possible but unlikely knowing Dutch.

Pull at the cuffs again, lubricate your wrist in spit and try and slide your hands through the tight metal. Stop when all you manage to do is draw more blood and rip a gouge into the thin skin. 

Swear quietly under your breath and press your other hand to the wound. It stings underneath the pressure but the blood stops long before Joseph returns, looking wild eyed and jittery at his edges. As if whatever he was doing previously unsettled him more than he was prepared for.

“I need to take a piss.” You bark at him when he stutters to a halt in the doorway. 

His head snaps towards you, as if he had forgotten your existence for a time. “Right, of course…” He walks towards you, hand sliding into his pocket and pulling out the small, ubiquitous handcuff keys. He stops a foot away from you, staring down at you with returning clarity. “You will behave,” Joseph says, glowering at you, “or there will be consequences.” 

Roll your eyes at him and push your hands out towards him. “Bathroom.” You insist. 

His eyes find yours and after a long moment of mutual glaring he bends to unlatch the left cuff. He steps back and returns the key to his pocket, eyeing you the entire time.

“I trust you know where it is.” 

Scowl at him and struggle to your feet, brace yourself against the concrete wall as your legs shake and wobble and threaten to fold beneath you as you take one step, then another, until you are halfway across the room, limping toward the open doorway of the bath. 

Joseph follows you, a few steps behind and slams his hand against the wooden door as you make an attempt to close it. “This stays open.” 

“Perv.” You growl and pause in the doorway, turning around to stare down at him. Juggle the thought of making your move now, of riling him up with continued schoolyard invective and taking him down with a few well-placed hits. 

Consider it, and then tuck it away, a momentary hold. The pressure of your bladder _is_ getting painful, Seed can wait. 

Find your relief in the scrubbed porcelain bowl, then turn to wash your hands, scrub soap into the torn skin of your wrists and watch Joseph in the mirror. 

His blue eyes are trained on your back, hyper focused on the twitch of your muscles as you scrub and less on the calculation in your eye. 

The older man’s shoulder is wrapped in bandages, a dot of pink appearing on the white cotton, a left over from when you shot him at his church. His ribs and torso have suffered similarly since you saw him last, trauma condensing into bruising and raw scrapes hidden under Band-Aids. He’ll be slower, due to the shoulder, you figure, as you shut off the tap and wipe your hand on the towel hanging off the hook on the wall. 

Seed better be slower, you pray, as you turn towards him, and lunge, fist connecting with his temple with a follow up to the bruised skin of his stomach. He collapses, and you follow him to the ground, knocking aside his wild punch and pinning him there with experience but not with weight. 

Scramble to get your hand around his throat and end this. But his hands have become vices at your wrists, yanking your cuffed hand to the side so quickly you lose your balance, slamming face first into his rising skull with a crack. 

Let out a yelp at the sudden pain, and struggle to right yourself, but Joseph sees his chance and takes it. Slamming a foot into your knee and wrenching your still cuffed arm up and back and near dislocating your shoulder as the loose cuff is shut tight around the decorative leg of a heavy dresser and you are again trapped on the floor. 

He stumbles up and away from you, panting heavily, as you force yourself up to your knees and claw for him.

“Nice try.” Joseph gasps, hand pressed against the split skin at his temple.

Snarl at him and pull against the chest of drawers, it squeals heavily as the wood grates against the concrete floor but budges no more than an inch. 

Joseph retreats from your hissing form and collapses down on the cot at the far end of the room. You can hear him swallow and pull his bloody hand away from his head. He eyes you, warily, clocking your location in front of the bathroom door, and coincidentally the majority of Dutch’s medical supply. You can see the wheels turning in his head, whether he should try to pass you to get at them, or heed the venom spitting from your lips. 

“There will be consequences.” The Father says eventually to the open room, eyes caught on the cherry red blood staining his hand. 

—————

You’re trapped. Caught like a fucking rabbit in a snare. You need out. You can't stay here, like this, where Joseph has you caged. Has you trapped like Jacob, like John, has you at his mercy and his bizarre fucking wiles like every other Seed brother, like every other attempt made to subdue, to silence, to control you in the past. 

There are three things you need. Three things you must obtain. Your freedom, his death, and a restart. Easy. Easy, it's so easy, if only you could--

Plant your foot against the dresser’s face, and brace with your wrist with your free hand and pull until you are shrieking obscenities into the air, until tears are streaming in rivers down your face, and the cuff is cutting into the raw skin at your wrist. Into the meat of your hand. Rage and snarl and thrash and be glad that Joseph has vacated the room.

Be glad that you are alone in the room with a trail of blood that marks the Father’s departure and length of your failure in scattered droplets. That you can cry out in self-inflicted pain, and sink into the state of frenzy and fear that lets you pull again and again against the cuff until you have gouged a cavern into the flesh of your thumb and the muscle beneath has begun to swell with the repeated abuse, swell from continual attempts to pop your thumb from its socket. 

Forget Doc Lindsay; forget the necessity of keeping your hand intact, of keeping both hands mobile. Of the dangers of torn ligaments, and ruined muscles, and the fact that should you damage yourself so severely, there is no one to set things right. That to truly heal, you will have to reloop and do things, all. over. again. 

Think only of your escape, of being able to crush Joseph's throat, to finally, finally put him in his place. To truly end his life in a way that feels like a win and not just a consolation prize. 

Roar away the growing pain, the cutting agony and tear.

Don’t stop when you hear frantic footfalls, when you see Joseph standing in the doorway, white faced, from the corner of your eye. 

“I’m going to fucking kill you!” You scream at him, “Just fucking wait. I’m going--!”

You’ve lost it now, any semblance of control. Wrath has overtaken you, just like John always knew it would, just like he has tattooed it onto your skin for. A warning, a judge met, a fucking prophesy. 

Joseph looks at you like he has never seen you before. Like you are both a bug under his microscope and a child amidst a tantrum. It’s like he’s embarrassed for you. Embarrassed and put off. Like the sight of his greatest enemy, the goddam snake in his garden, near hyperventilation and trembling with exertion is an ugly stain that needs covered. Something to be hidden from houseguests, not taken at face value.

“You’re hurting yourself Deputy. You need to stop” Is all he says, his hand dipping down into his pocket and closing around something small.

He steps towards you, snagging a Kleenex from the dresser top and Shit! Fuck! That thing in his pocket is Bliss, a vial of oil. He’s going to--

Lay off the bloodied mess of your hand, let your arm hand uselessly against the chain and lunge for him gracelessly. Your muscles falter despite your rage. He scruffs you, easily, thoughtlessly, like you are little more than a kitten, and bears you down, pressing the Bliss laden tissue to your face, he shushes you. “Easy now, you need to stop. Easy now Deputy, you’re okay.” 

Your head touches the ground and white has overtaken your vision, sparkles flooding thickly to the point you cannot see beyond them. “Just go to sleep, you're okay. I’ve got you.” Joseph says.

But no, he’s wrong. The Bliss has you. It is the Bliss that pulls you under, and exhaustion that holds you there. Fall asleep on the hard ground, stretched out on cold concrete that steals the warmth from your skin and leaves your muscles stiff. Succumb to the gentle pull of Bliss, of your concussion, to the wear and tear of the last few months, to the no man's land of a possible coma, of unattended head wounds and warnings your coaches had lectured you on time and time again. Fall into an endless sleep and hope distantly that it keeps you. 

—————

Wake up and you are alone. You are alone and your wrist is swaddled in layers of fabric. The material is so thick up your wrist and hand that you cannot bend it, can hardly flex your fingers. That you cannot even feel the pressure of the cuff from where it strains around the thick cotton swabbing. 

Curse Joseph, curse Joseph and press your eyes closed. Press them tight until they hurt, until the pressure has built and red has burst into the darkened screen of your eyelids. 

—————

“There will be consequences,” Joseph had said hours ago. Consequences were things you were ready for, things you had been well versed in after fifty three lives. You knew all about consequences, the give and take of actions and inaction. You are prepared to be starved, to be beaten, to be locked away and ignored. To be denied the most basic rights of a human being, to be degraded to an animal living in its own filth and squalor. 

You are prepared for the actions of his brothers; you are not prepared for Joseph.

Joseph who places a folding chair just outside of your range of movement and sits in it. Joseph who had pulled a white covered book from the bookshelf by Dutch’s bed and peels back the old prepper’s many post-it notes to read. 

“... _If you want to live you need to ignore the slander. You need to believe me. You need to follow me.”_

Joseph whose voice is strong and cadence steady and the words, the words, those fucking _words_ take you straight back to the room, where Jacob kept you, where Jacob ruined you, where Jacob molded you into the perfect little Hunter, his own goddamned Chosen on a leash.

The room where those words crawled out of too loud speakers and you lost every last shred of self. Now again, in a room with no egress, you find yourself surrounded with too loud words, and a voice that will not quit. Forget for a moment, just which nightmare it is you are living. 

—————

Joseph stops once he has read the book through and you have long stopped struggling and snapping and fighting at the sound of his voice. The preacher stands and pulls his chair away and places it in an empty spot against the wall, far on the other side of the room. He places the book on top of it, and leaves you, leaves you to go fiddle with the radio, which fills the bunker with empty static and loneliness.

Time passes, though you don't know how much, you have lost track between the endless static and the mindless tick of the clock. Spend the empty time struggling to lift the chest of drawers off the floor high enough to pull the cuff free. Spend it cursing Dutch and the woodworker who made it, the wood heavy, and drawers full of what you could only assume was ballast, for all your futile attempts at budging the thing. 

Strain and strain until you wear yourself out, falling prone onto the concrete ground, bleeding sluggishly into the dirty bandages around your leg, and choke on the festering blood that leaks constantly from your ripped cheek. 

Prod the too hot flesh, and swollen skin with gentle fingers and wince at the lance of pain that bursts up and down your nerves with the slightest of pressures. 

Wonder if Joseph means to kill you this way, wonder how far into the past that death will take you.

—————

You find yourself sleeping endlessly those first few days. Find that months of long continuous fighting will do that to a body, exhaust it down to its very core. Pass out for hours without intention, gracelessly and uninhibited. Sleep away hours and days, lose track of Joseph and the hum of the radio. Wake up only when the Father presses a cold water bottle against your skin, drops watery plates of rehydrated scrambled egg in front of your face. 

He sits with you as you eat and he reads out loud from his personal bible. Intoning each chapter paragraph by paragraph, pausing after each grouping of sentences to wait and see if you’ll comment. 

Let the Preacher stew in silence until he reaches the final few words and asks you, 

“Having heard my words, having listened, do you still think I have done wrong?”

As if this were fucking book club, a fucking college reading assignment.

Scoff at him and shove the empty plastic plate his way.

“I think you did wrong by these eggs,” you snarl, and ignore any attempts at further discussion. 

—————

Your days are limited by your reach and your chained location, three feet outside the small bathroom, which you can inhabit with your legs if you stretch out on the floor. Claiming it as your space, though not possible for your use, through your sheer size. Take petty joy in the discomfort this causes Joseph, in turning the bathroom into a place of contention, into enemy territory.

Spend your first full day of consciousness shuffling through what dresser drawers you can reach. Pull open the first drawer and sort through Dutch’s clothes until you find a pair of old cotton joggers that should mostly fit you. Pull them on and ignore how short they are in the leg. Even when sitting low on your hips the fabric still climbs high up on your calves.

Pull open another and find it near bursting with old papers. Struggle through his sloppy handwriting while marveling over old tax documents and land disputes. Find odd amusement in reading forgotten take out menus and birthday cards interspersed with holiday greetings. Gaze over loopy signatures then tuck the glitter coated cardstock back into the smallest drawer and shove it carefully closed.

Open another and find a treasure trove of old blankets which you quickly pull out and turn into a nest. Settle into the old quilts and listen to the clock tick. 

Then find yourself searching through those drawers the next day, and the next, until you have read through all the hallmark cards, and weighed each line of the official papers, and have done pushups, and sit ups, and planks, and every other floor exercise your battered body is capable of and find yourself bored. 

Find yourself so bored that you turn to yanking and pulling at the cuff on your wrist for the sheer joy of feeling something other than monotony. Yank and pull until you have broken open the damaged skin beneath the thick bandages and start to bleed endlessly. Bleed without pause until Joseph has stepped into the room and has turned to you with cautious eyes. Bleed until he has pulled cloth bindings from his pocket and he stoops to rewrap your arm in linen. Wait until he has tucked the fabric beneath itself and has gone to take a step away to trip him. Trip him and smash your unbound fist into the corner of his mouth, again and again until he's bleeding and you can't help but laugh at the sheer joy the flicker of surprise in his eye has caused you. The fucking thrill of seeing him scramble away and the cagey way he shields his face.

Laugh and laugh and gasp out, “What would Jacob think? Seeing you getting your ass handed to you by a guy with one hand?” choke on your own laughter here and stutter out between gasps. “Bet he’d call you _weak_.”

That’s when Joseph snaps, the mad preacher, he snaps and he falls on you with all the wrathful fury you remember from the church. He hits and claws and punches and you two tear each other apart. Split lips, bruise eye sockets, and spot abdominals with red. Until you have pinned him down with his hands under your knees, and you’re rifling through his pockets in order to find the handcuff key.

“Where the fuck is the key?!” You snarl, as your hand claws against his neck, “Where the fuck is it?”

“You think I still carry that?” It’s Joseph’s turn to laugh, and he smiles at you with blood soaked teeth. “I’ve got that hidden away somewhere nice and safe, Deputy. Attack me all you want, but you won’t get free that way. You’ll die stuck to this dresser if you kill me. Is that really how you want to go?”

Snarl out a swear and roll off him, seethe as Joseph scrambles away and stumbles out of the room. 

—————

For three days Joseph avoids Dutch’s room. He leaves you to starve, and thirst, and think.

He leaves you to stew in the loneliness, in the dimly lit solitude and worry. To worry about could haves and might-have-beens. To worry your friends, about your animals, your acquaintances. He gives you time to wonder, and speculate if your friends that fought with you at Joseph’s church, if they made it home, made it safe to their bunkers. 

If Nick Rye made it back to Kim and Carmina. If Grace got to her bunker, if Hurk and Tracy and Jess and Wheaty and Jerome and Mary May and Tammy all made it home safe, or if they ended up like your coworkers, dead ingloriously and by your hand.

Wonder if you have to add their blood to your ledger, if you are guilty of killing them as well. 

—————

It is day two of your Joseph-imposed solitude that you contemplate killing yourself. It would be hard to do certainly, without a gun or knife to ease the transition, but you could pull it off. Not as quickly as after Grace, or as quietly as your last death, but you could do it. 

You could do it, and step back into time, into freedom, into a chance to save the other Deputies. To ensure your friends remain safe in their homes and near their bunkers while you leave to deal with Joseph.

Or: your traitorous mind suggests, you could fall right back into Jacob’s clutches, back into the cage, and the starvation, and the endless cycles of the maze, with endless repetitions of _Only You_ seeping into your ears, your mind, pulling away your sanity, your free will, until you are killing your way through the Wolf’s Den, killing your way through the Whitetails, killing Eli. Again.

You would have to kill Jacob again. Have to _see_ Jacob again. Have to listen to his voice, and feel the stomach turning nausea and unwanted pleasure of his voice growling out, “ _Good. Do it again.”_

And you cannot help but choke on your own spit, on your own fear, on the deep seated terror that the eldest Seed brings you. You never died after killing Jacob. You managed to take down Joseph on your first try. You don't know how far back a death will send you. To the morning of Carmina’s birth? To Jacob’s cage? To the car crash that killed your coworkers? To the first day locked in this bunker?

 _You don't know_.

—————

Then, finally, Joseph returns.. He steps into the room with a bottle of water in his hand and a look of relief on his face when his eyes pass over your form. It’s as though he has been missing _you_.

—————

Pick at the crusting bandages on your leg and stare Joseph down.

Stare him down until he has no choice but to lift his head from his reading and return your gaze.

“What do you want, my child?” He finally asks, drawing his words slowly in a way that makes his voice even more southern.

“I need to tend my wounds, _Father_. Lest they get infected.” You sneer in disdain, doing your best to match the high handed diction you remember from yearly forays into Christmas Mass.

Joseph watches you, and you can read the calculation in his eye. The wandering thought process as it plays across his face. Stare him down.

Stare him down until he, with a sigh, places his book on the chair and shuffles past you into the bathroom to grab the med kit and a plastic bucket of lukewarm water. 

He dumps both near you and steps away, arms crossed over his bruised chest and eyes intent.

“Do you have much medical training Deputy?” Seed asks as you struggle to ease away the week old bandages with your one free hand.

“Enough.” You allow as you place aside those bandages and start to gently wash out the old wounds, rubbing gently with an old washcloth until dried blood lifts away. “More than I did before you started a war.”

“It was the government that started the war.” Joseph states like a mantra, “It never would have happened if you didn't attempt an arrest.”

Douse yourself in hydrogen peroxide and glare at him, transfer the energy of the bubbling pain to your eyes. “Marshal brought a warrant. I was doing my job.”

“You were given an option; you could have made the _choice.”_

Slather Neosporin then rewrap tight in bandages. Bring your eyes off the task long enough to look him in the face and ask, “Do you think that was ever a possibility?” 

Hold his gaze for a long time before turning away. Work your way methodically though the rest of your wounds until only one remains.

You cannot help but pause when you get to your face, brushing careful fingers over the cotton wadding Joseph had taped over your cheek a long week ago. 

“Is there a hand mirror?” You ask, swallowing past the growing unease in your stomach.

You must admit to having a streak of vanity, long hours spent at the gym, keeping your body just so, carefully meal planning and drinking endless protein shakes to ensure your muscles remained thick. After lives of struggling to keep weight, and then later on struggling to gain it back after Jacob starved it off you. You have put a pause on maintaining that athlete’s body; have been forced to settle for the starvation muscles, and gaunt cheeks, and hands that feel nothing like your own. You have suffered before with a body that felt like a stranger, but your face at least, has remained yours. And now…

Now you are afraid of what you’ll see under the bandaging. Afraid to see how much more of yourself the Seed family has taken. The wound feels bad enough under your tongue when you brush against it, when you chew, or swallow, or talk. The flesh, hot and swollen, and absolute agony. You can’t imagine it looks much better.

“I haven’t seen any,” Seed draws in that slow way of his. He presses his lips together and tips his chin at you.

He pauses for a long few seconds, seeming to weigh his options. “I’ll tend to you, my child.”

“No.” You growl, “You won’t. Just let me use the bathroom mirror.” Tug at your right wrist, the one still cuffed to the dresser pointedly.

Joseph shakes his head at you. “I’ve given you two chances already Deputy Rook and you broke my trust both times. You went so far as to harm me, when my intentions were always to help.”

Scoff at that and roll your eyes. “Forget it then.” Drop your palm and set to putting the Med Kit back to rights.

“Is your pride really worth the infection, Deputy?” He tilts his head and his eye catches the light, making the blue glow like a Vegas sign. 

He takes a step towards you. “I am offering my trust to you one more time and expecting you to share some in return.”

He talks at you, calm and steady, like you would a crying child, or trapped animal. “It is not my intention to harm you Deputy. I told you once that we are family. That you are all I have left. I meant it then, and I mean it now. You are my child, mine to care for and to teach for the benefit and directive of God.”

Joseph comes to a crouch beside you, hand coming to rest on yours, tugging gently at the blood stained cloth within it. “It is time to put away your pride and to let me take care of this.”

Catch his stare and hold it, consider him, weigh the truthfulness, the veracity of his words and loosen your grip, let the rag slide between your fingers and let your eyes fall closed. 

Turn your head, just so and let his fingers pick at the tape on your cheek and peel it away, let him ease the cotton away from the crust of blood and pus that clings to the wound and days of beard growth. 

Let him hold a damp cloth to our face, and press gentle fingers against screaming skin. Let him and let him and let him until a fresh bandage is in place and he pulls back from you and steps away. 

Allow him this concession, let him take this ground. Trust is a two-way street, after all. Give it time. Give it time, soon you will be able to strike.

—————

It has been two weeks and finally the endless buzz of the long range radio has turned to words. 

Joseph had been doing his daily reading, breaking every few paragraphs to preach beyond the written words, boring you near to death with the repetition of his daily lecture. 

Then suddenly between breaths you hear a woman’s voice, too far away to understand but shocking in its appearance. Joseph's head snaps up, he drops the book and sprints from the room.

“Wait!” You call after him, “Don’t just—“ 

Groan and lean back against the dresser, shut your eyes and strain to hear the words.

“Hello! Hello!” You can hear Joseph call out. “Yes-Yes this is the Father! How many—“

And then his voice goes quiet and no matter how much you strain you can’t hear the rest of his words.

Wait and strain and listen to the rise and fall of his voice until finally the radio clicks off and he stumbles back into the room, stumbles over to you, and slides down the face of the dresser to sit by your side. 

His arm, wrapped in an old flannel shirt of Dutch’s brushes against your naked skin and his face, when he turns to look at you is ecstatic, rapturous in its joy.

“They survived.” He says, turning to you, teeth bright and white as he smiles. “That was John’s Gate.” He says and a tear breaks from his lash line, “They survived.” 

—————

Joseph begins a daily radio call with his followers, preaching over airwaves, for an hour each day. You can hear the passion in his voice, the absolute certainty in his words, and the fire in his speech, see the passion brimming within him as he pours through the Bible and writes sermons into a spiral bound notebook. It would be inspiring if it weren’t so self-righteous. 

Wait for him to bounce back into the bedroom, to share with you the apparent flourishing of his people then ask, “Have you checked the other channels? Have you heard from anyone else...the Resistance?”

Watch as he pauses, and he turns to you, smile smoothing into seriousness as he says, “No, there’s been no one else.”

Watch as he shrugs and says, “With the radiation, maybe there’s been too much interference. I’ll tell you if I hear them.”

Nod at him and turn away, tuck yourself into your own space, fold into your own body. Know that his words are lies, that he will never share your people’s existence, just as he will never share yours with them. 

—————

It had been a month by Joseph’s count and you are so tired of being angry. 

Rage is exhausting; keeping yourself in a state of _wrath_ is exhausting. Had been, long before Joseph and long before this bunker. It used to be easier too, between the Bliss withdraw, and residents of Hope County to protect. Righteous anger used to be so easy, but now it sits more like regret in your chest. Heavy and unrelenting.

Joseph seems to notice the despondency in you, in the lessening of you lashing out with words and sometimes body when he wanders too close, when you subside and let him tend your wounds without fuss, when you let him close to your face with scissors so he can remove the dental floss stitches in your cheek. When he brushes a hand through your beard and holds your face in his hands and stares you in the eye. 

“I was so angry when you killed my brothers, my sister, I was so very mad.” He says to you one day, “I’m still angry. You took something precious to me and you destroyed it. But I know why you did it, why you thought you were right to do so. You were led astray, led down the wrong path. I want you to know that I forgive you, that I understand it wasn’t malice that drove your actions, but misinformation, that you were misled, and turned from the path of righteousness.”

He takes your free hand in his own and squeezes gently, he is crouched before you, too close for comfort, but what even is your comfort anymore. 

“Do you ever get tired of hearing yourself talk?” You sigh and shift and pull your hand away.

Joseph smiles at you but doesn’t reach for you again. “I’m a preacher Deputy, talking is what we do. But...I’d like to talk about you for a while. Get to know you some, like you know me, like you know my story.”

Shake your head and stare off over his shoulder. “Not interested.”

“Just a little something, it doesn’t have to be important. How about...how about you tell me your name? I don’t want to have to keep calling you Deputy.” 

He smiles at you gently, beseechingly. 

Huff and tilt your head back, rub your tongue over the rough scar tissue in your mouth and say, “Deputy is my first name.” 

He’s still smiling at you when he pats your knee and stands. “Alright Deputy, alright.” 

—————

Things become better between the two of you. _Better_...but not _really_ better, more like stable. Things have stabilized between you two. You have fallen into a pattern.

Wake up when Joseph plants a plate of food near your face. Eat the soupy oatmeal while he reads to you from his self-written book, or occasionally actual passages from an old pocket bible of Dutch’s. Shake off his offer to pray together.

Do what exercises you can while Joseph scribbles down the final few touches to that day's sermon. Drip sweat onto the floor as he drips fervor onto notebook paper. Finish up your routine around the time he disappears into the bathroom then leaves you for the long range radio.

Give yourself a whores’ bath in the bucket of water Joseph draws from the bathroom sink, then relieve yourself in it when you’re done, push the used bucket as far into the bathroom as your limited movement will allow and wait for Joseph to return from his daily radio check in with the Peggy survivors. 

Nap for a while, snug in your layered quilts until Joseph wanders back in and decides it's time to play twenty questions. Ignore him for the most part; let him draw his own conclusions from your silence and occasional twitching. Find amusement in the weird depths your muteness leads him to. Let him fill the silence, Interrogation tactics 101, laugh when in his desperate attempts to get you to interact leads to bizarre questions.

Favorite flavor of cake? Preferred era of history channel special? Favorite superhero? Surely, Deputy, you _must_ have had one!

Ignore him until he gives up and departs the room in order to work on the next day's sermon. Do another workout set until the distant smell of propane informs you of the coming dinner. Eat whatever canned meat and veg he places before you and wish he was a better cook.

Wait for an hour after dinner and then be treated with a preview of tomorrow's Peggie sermon. He reads it to you, pausing to rework certain wording based off the minute twitch of your face and whatever mystery he reads there in. 

Let him attend your mostly healed wounds, make use of the bucket toilet one last time, then settle into your nest of quilts. Lay there in the throes of boredom, until Joseph flicks out the lights and settles in for bed. 

Lay there in the crushing blackness and let your mind wander. Wander and wander until memories flash before your eyes, of trees and rocks and mountains. Of blue and open skies. Of your friends, and then their houses, and their bunkers, and wonder if those places are still standing. If they are inhabited, if your friends made it, if they survived. If in seven long years you will be able to cut your ties with Joseph and walk free. If you will be able to find them, tucked safe in those bunkers, at their houses. Lay in the darkness and dream.

—————

The silent treatment is getting to Joseph. He is not a man used to being ignored. 

It’s benign enough at the start. An increased amount of time in which he attempts to interact throughout the day, the extra time he spends talking to his faithful over the radio, the little attempts made to garner your favor. A pudding cup here, an old bit of newspaper to read there. A blank piece of paper and an eight pack of stubby crayons.

Spend a few days near ecstatic with environmental enrichment before it comes to a shambling halt. Be woken one night by Joseph twitching frantically in his bed. Aborted words slipping from his mouth as he seizes and shakes catch the glint of his open eyes in the red emergency lighting from the hallway. 

“Joseph!?” You call, too far away to shake him awake, but concerned none the less that this will be a seizure that will strand you here, trapped in a room with a dead body. “Hey! Wake up!”

Call and call until Joseph's body makes one last desperate jackknife then settles against the thin mattress. Listen to him gasp in the darkness and pause a moment before asking. “You okay?”

You can see the full bodied twitch his form makes in response to your voice and he pushes himself up, feet planted on the ground as he sits. “Yes.” He takes a moment to catch his breath, wipes a hand across his face. “Yes, I am better than okay. The Lord has spoken to me, I have seen our way forward.”

You can hear the smile in his voice as he says, “There is so much to do Deputy.” 

Watch him stand and stumble through the darkness, weak legged and jittery as he passes out the door and down the hallway. Listen for the distant click of a light switch and a familiar rustle of paper. Know without a doubt that he is writing more into his notebook. The one he uses to plan sermons, the one probably filled with ideas and half mad ravings for the next testament in the Book of Joseph. 

Heave out a slow and shaky breath. Know that this will end badly.

—————

Wake up to a finger skimming wetly over the beard growth on your upper lip. Take a surprised inhale and wake to a world bursting in white. The room shakes and shudders in your vision, your eyesight nearly whiting out in the Bliss sparkle. 

“Fuuuuck.” You moan, raising your free hand to your face to try and wipe away the Bliss Oil sitting under your nose. 

Struggle weakly as Joseph grabs that hand and holds your wrist tight. He leans in close, eyes peering deep into yours as he murmurs. “There now, you’re okay, easy does it.” and he tilts you back back back until you’re pillowed in your nest and weak under his hands.

“Shh, there now, “Joseph says, “the Bliss is very different when taken properly now isn't it? None of that nasty adrenaline to skew things hmm? Why, things are looking quite nice now aren't they?”

He turns his head and looks towards the ceiling and yeah, he's right. The concrete above you is crumbling away to gently falling dust and you can see the sky overhead, perfect and blue and dotted gently by puffy clouds. You can feel a gentle breeze upon your skin and the scent in your nose is sweet, so wonderfully sweet and you can't help but lick your lips. 

“We have so much work to do.” 

Joseph is smiling down at you, his eyes crinkling and bright and his hands are no longer holding you down, but stroking gently at the sides of your face. And fuck. Fuck it feels good. It feels so good to have the touch of another. 

Sigh gently under his ministrations and fall into the grasp of the Bliss that Faith had primed you for countless months ago.

—————

Joseph takes your hand in his and leads you down deer trails, through forests thick with greenery and gently swaying flowers. He leads you to a wide field, grass thick and high, and a proud oak tree claiming the center. Its branches are widespread and shade the space beneath its trunk. You settle into the grass under it, rolling, twisting your body against the blades, drowning in the sensation of it. 

Joseph takes a seat near you, back pressing up against the rough tree bark and he smiles at you indulgently, like you are a puppy gallivanting for his enjoyment alone. His look doesn't stop you from pressing your face into the grass and breathing deep, nose alight with sweet and sugar and the distant memory of fresh cut lawns. 

“Did anyone ever tell you about New Eden, what the Project was intended for?” Joseph asks when you finally roll over and stretch out on your back, basking in the warmth of the day.

Shake your head and let your eyes fall closed, hear don’t see Joseph reach for you, to place his hand on top of your head and card his fingers through your too long hair. 

“We prepared for the Collapse at Eden’s Gate, we prepared so we would be ready, ready for a world made new, a world recovered and perfect, just as God intended. It was planned that we would build a community in this new world; make a place without sin, without the governmental swamp, to return to simpler times. More honest times. We would live mindfully and off the land. We would farm, and hunt and build and grow, and we would do it under God's directive, with his teachings in mind.”

“Could have joined the Amish.” You sigh out.

“We looked to them, certainly, when we were gathering our supplies, took note of their methods...but their ways wouldn't have protected us from the collapse. We had to start new; we had to make Eden’s Gate to ensure our protection.”

He strokes his hand through your hair, working out the tangles as he goes. “I’m going to need your help. I’m going to need your help to make New Eden a reality. Do you think you could do that? Do you think you could help me?”

Your lips twitch, an automatic ‘Yes’ almost falling from them before you catch yourself. Before something in his words doesn't hit you quite right. Lick your lips instead, wet the chapped skin, and catch a hint of sweetness on your tongue. “What about my friends? The other survivors? They’ll need my help. Need me more. They don’t...they don’t have supplies stockpiled, they weren't ready for-for…'' raise your right hand to wave it loosely, to encompass the general destruction with a gesture, but find yourself stopped short. Hand yanking to a quick halt. 

Frown and tilt your head up, so that you are looking to your arm, stretched out above you. Yank again and fail to move it. Stare at your wrist laying on the golden grass and pull pull pull against the unseen binding. 

“Hey no!” Joseph says, leaning over you, his hand fitting into yours, palm against palm. “Look at me, okay?”

“But my hand!?” You snap, fear rising up inside you. 

“Shh, nothings wrong. I promise.” His free hand slides into his pocket and he pulls forth a glass vial. He uncorks it with his teeth, presses his thumb against the opening, and then swipes the finger under your nose. 

Breathe in and lose yourself in the sparkle, fall deeper into the Bliss.

—————

Open your eyes and you are in Joseph’s church. Kneeling before the altar, hands clasped in prayer before you, you stare at the eight pointed cross. Joseph is kneeling beside you, eyes closed, breath slow, he asks you, “What have you come to confess?”

“Confess?” You say, confusion bubbling slowly within you. “I don’t….what?”

“You told me you wanted to confess, my child.” The preacher turns his blue eyes to you, so very solemn, so very serious. “You had a weight you wanted to unburden yourself of. I am here to help, here to listen.”

“I-I don’t...there’s nothing?”

“There is no need to lie. You’re safe here. No harm will come to you.” He soothes. “I know you have been worried, been feeling guilty.”

“Guilty?” Shake your head.

This is wrong. Something is wrong here. You can see it in the looseness of the details, the perfect framing of the altar, the cross, the light that streams in the from window, setting the room alight in gold. 

His hand settles against your wrist, gently like a reminder. “You killed a lot of people. A lot of _good_ people.”

Shake your head again, certain, now. “No. No I did what was necessary. I _had_ to.” 

“You didn't have to kill them, Child. You took so many lives; your hands are stained in blood.”

Joseph is watching you intently, eyes like blue embers as they stare into yours. He wants something you cannot give him. Will not give him. Swallow the thickness rising in your throat and bite out,

“I did what was necessary. They were killing people. Trying to kill my friends! Kill me!”

He turns to you, taking your shoulders in his hands and even in his rising ire he is perfect. He is Bliss perfect. 

“But how many fell to your guns? To your hand? My child--”

Bare your teeth and snarl, **“I am _not_ your Child!”**

—————

Wake up and you are in the Henbane, nestled deep in a field of Faiths flowers. Push yourself to your feet and stumble through the white blooms. Trip your way down the mountain as sparkles overtake your eyes and make traversing the uneven grade harder than normal. 

Breathe out a sigh of relief when you see the distant arch of the trailer park. Pick up pace and jog your way to the safety of Sharky’s home. Envision his wide smile and good cheer, the beer he’ll press into your hands and the disco that will help you unwind. 

Stumble past the first trailer home just as the bombs fall. As fire tears through the trailer court, as double wides flip and twist and toss like clothes in the wash. Stop dead as the blast rolls through you, rolls past you, and ignites the world. Watch it burn and burn and burn. Watch the smoke rise, and the glass shatter, and the paint evaporates off the vinyl siding. Stand there amidst destruction until the world calms to a smolder. Step forward and forward until you are pressing open the door to Sharky’s trailer. Until you step inside and see his corpse. 

The flesh black and red, charred like the Angel’s he liked to burn alive. Face a rictus grin of pearly white teeth and remaining muscle. A second passes and the corpse moves, _Sharky moves_ , his head snapping towards you, eyelids peeling open to reveal round white globes.

“Why?” Sharky says, voice ghastly and dry as the desert night, “Why did you do this to me?”

“I didn’t! I didn’t!” You plead, “This isn't my fault! I promise! I-”

“Why did you kill me Rook?” Sharky asks as the world falls away, and you are standing in Falls End and the town has been leveled by the bomb.

Stumble down the main street, passing charred bodies, laid out where they fell, still in mid run. Stumble your way through town toward the Spread Eagle, the only building still standing. 

Force the door open and there is Jerome and Mary May, and Boomer at their feet, and for one split second they are perfect, whole and safe and then they burst into flame before your eyes. They scream and howl and writhe in their suffering and they keep screaming,

“You killed us!? Why did you kill us Rook!?”

And it happens again and again. Until you have seen each of your friends’ burn before your eyes and each and every one of them has laid the blame at your feet.

—————

Scream yourself awake, scream and struggle and thrash. Near deglove your cuffed hand as you yank and tug and try to escape the nightmare behind you. Scream and wail even as Joseph straddles you, forces your cuffed hand down and still and cradles the back of your head with the other. Draws you up and holds you safe against the soft cotton of his shoulder. As he shushes you, and holds you carefully to him, as he promises you’re safe, you’re okay, you're with _him._

Hyperventilate yourself into oblivion. Wake up screaming two hours later when your dreams are filled with fire and blood and corpses and corpses and corpses.

Joseph is there to comfort you then too, pulling you close and wrapping you tight.

————— 

You’re set free the following morning. Joseph unlocking the cuff around your wrist to better tend to your flayed skin. He leads you into the bathroom with a firm hand on your elbow and seats you on the closed lid of the toilet, before he turns away to dig through the medical supply. Reach out and pull a washcloth from the nearby rack and wet it. Hold it to the crusted blood at your wrist, let it soften then wipe away the dried rust. Once clean the father takes hold of your arm, moving it over the sink and drowns the circular gash in disinfectant. Try to shutter your gasp at the sudden burn but Joseph makes sympathetic noises despite your attempt at silence. Let the cleaner drip off your skin while he reaches for the bandages and rings them round your wrist and up your palm. 

He stills then, your hand in his. “If you’re allowed a shower, will you behave?”

Take a moment to think about it, to weigh your options before nodding once sharply.

“Alright then. Stay here.” and Joseph steps away, wanders out of the bathroom, out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Lose track of him then, frozen as you are on the toilet lid. 

You are untethered, unchained, have freedom within your grasp and within your ability for the first time in weeks and yet you find yourself afraid to move. Afraid to stand up, and walk out of that room and further into the bunker where nothing but mystery and loneliness await you. 

Here you are safe. A zoo animal in its exhibit. You know the landscape; understand the rules and the schedule. If you were to step outside, to venture forth, what cruel reality would make itself known? What lie of Seed’s would you uncover?

Remain frozen where Joseph left you, bogged down with uncertainty, until the man returns with a long cardboard box in hand. A familiar brand of saran wrap, which he uses to shroud the new bandages about your wrist in plastic. 

He places the box down on the countertop and tilts his head at the white tiled shower. “Go on then.” 

Ease yourself to your feet, and skitter a loose orbit around him, careful not to brush up against his skin as you pass. Step onto the cold tile just as he steps out of the bathroom and walks across the bedroom to the bedside table. 

Slide off your pants, strip free of your old underwear and drop them to the floor outside the shower, slide the obfuscated glass door closed and reach for the tap. Let loose a ragged gasp as freezing water falls on you and shudder against its icy fingers. Brace against its cold chill and shock yourself awake. 

The water warms quickly however, turning scalding in the few moments it takes for Joseph to reenter the bathroom. Bask in the sheer joy of hot water. In the play of it across your skin, the sensation of it dripping off your nose.

Don't mind that Joseph has chosen to wait outside the shower stall, sitting on the closed seat of the toilet, bible in hand as you scrub months’ worth of blood, sweat and grime off your body. Don't mind that he can see every scrawny inch of you, more bone than muscle, more scar than skin. Don't mind that he watches as you step out of the shower and towel yourself off, don't mind that he hands you clean clothes and watches as you slide them on. Boxers, then sweatpants, then finally the first shirt you’ve worn since the bombs fell.

Don't mind that he wraps your uninjured left wrist in thick bandages before sliding the handcuff back around it. 

Mind though when his hand trails up your arm and he brushes a lazy thumb across the fifty you have scarred under the crook of your elbow, and the three tally marks that sit below.

“What's this from?”

Yank your arm away with a scowl and ignore him in favor of riffling through Dutch's cabinet drawers. 

“Deputy.” He chides, “You promised good behavior.”

“Didn't promise answers.” You bite back as you pull out a razor blade and shaving cream and place them on the worn Formica sink top. 

“I think the beard is a good look.” Joseph comments, mouth tilting up at the corners as if he has come to find your terse dialogue endearing as opposed to the standoffish salvo you meant it to be.

“What? A beard is Seed Family approved?” You shoot back as you wipe the back of your arm against the fogged mirror and catch sight of yourself for the first time in months. 

You don't cut an impressive figure. You don't even look like yourself.

Months - No _lives_ of war and trauma and desperation has stolen the youth from you. Your face is gaunt beneath the beard, eyes sunken and smudged in black under the socket. Stress lines have settled into your forehead, cutting deep between your brows. Your too-shaggy hair has greyed with abandon in the weeks since Addie noticed the first silver stand. You are a quickly developing patchwork of salt and pepper. You look more than a decade past your twenty three years. 

You are stunned to realize you wouldn't even recognize your face, were it not for the fact the body in the mirror matched your movements and your eyes were the right color. It steals your breath away and you haven't even gotten to the scarring hidden under nearly three months’ worth of facial hair. 

“You’ll want to keep the beard.” Joseph says, as he closes the bible. He leans forward, resting his arms on the tops of his legs, and goddamn him but his face is earnest. “It hides the worst of the damage. _Trust me_ when I say I wish I could have done better.”

It is those words that seal your course of action. Spray a pile of foam into your hands and slather it onto your cheeks.

Joseph just sighs heavily and leans back, head shaking back and forth minutely. “Do what you will, but don't say I didn't warn you.” 

He right in the end. 

It is so much worse than you imagined.

————— 

The scar stretches from the corner of your mouth, across the cheek, under the cheek bone to the lobe of the ear. It distracts from your face, hell it distracts from your everything. It's just ragged, pink and puffy, and it swallows the entirety of you. Pins you down to just one characteristic. 

Your face, a horrendously curving scar. 

Stare at yourself in the mirror as your skin stings after an irritating shave and your worst enemy places a careful hand on your elbow and tries to gentle the roaring in your head with a few soft words.

Stare and stare and stare.

————— 

Joseph has chained you to the bed frame again. Pushed you down on the thin mattress and clipped the free handcuff around the spokes of the headboard.

“Try and get some sleep.” He says before he walks across the room, stoops to pick up your bloodstained blankets, and disappears into the darkened hallway. 

Swear under your breath and lean back against the cold wall and the American flag that hangs there. Rub your fingers against the cheap synthetic fabric and enjoy for a moment, the difference in view this position in the room gives you.

You can see out the doorway, can catch a glimpse into the room across the hall, and see the way the fish tank you know resides there sets the dark room off in a bluish glow. 

You can better hear the low buzz of the radio, the hum and liquid swish of the washing machine as it starts up. You can follow Joseph's footsteps from the laundry room near the bunker entrance to what you assume is the kitchen. 

Let your torso slide down the wall until you thump against the thin pillow at the head of the bed. Breathe in the stale scent of a pillowcase not your own and pull your legs up onto the cot. Curl them so that your legs aren’t dangling off the end and wait there. Blink slowly, and count each tick of the distant clock. Sleep will not take you; you won't let it take you. Blink slowly. Count minutes under your breath.

Don’t fall asleep. You _cannot_ fall asleep.

—————

A hand brushes across your face and the suddenness of it makes you jerk. Blink frantically to clear the dry eyed blur, to ease the sting in your pupils and the bloodshot whites, blink and blink and blink until your eyes focus and you can see Joseph kneeling before you, face drawn with concern.

“Welcome back.” He murmurs when recognition floods back into your face and pulls your expression closed and pinches your lips taut. 

“I didn't go anywhere.” You say with a sigh and shove an elbow under yourself to rise.

“No, of course not.” Joseph allows, rising to his feet he pulls the keys from his pocket and undoes the handcuff looped around the bed frame. He returns the key to his pocket and steps back, hand held out to you.

Pause for a moment and then take it. Frown as he draws you to your feet with ease, at the disparity in the height you find yourself at, you could have sworn you were taller than this, that his eyes didn't usually land so close to your own when you stood face to face. 

Look away with a frown, scrub your right hand across your smooth face and gesture weakly at your corner by the bathroom door. “Vacation’s done then?” Try and fail to smile.

“It doesn't have to be.” Joseph smiles back at you, teeth white and maybe just a little too wide. He seems inordinately pleased by your attempt at a joke, or maybe he’s just pleased that you attempted to further the conversation on your own, as weak as it may have been. 

He is still holding your cuffed hand in his. 

Seed steps away from the bed, pulling you with him, across the room and into the hallway. Your legs shake with each step; you cannot help but feel as though your knees will give out on you with each footfall. 

He leads you into the kitchen and you assaulted by scent in the doorway, by the bright homey colors of the walls, the dish towels, by the stacks of pancakes that steam with sweetness and little pats of butter. 

Joseph leads you into the nearest chair and drops into the chair across the table. He regards you with too blue eyes and a wry smile. “I thought we could try something different. I realize now that I may have gone about this wrong…”

He picks up a knife and spreads the butter around on the fluffy discus. He drenches his pancakes in syrup out of a bottle shaped like a lady and places it gently before you. 

“We need to be partners, Deputy Rook. To survive this mentally, physically...we need to get along. I know that being friendly may be beyond what you’re comfortable with. I understand that…you’re not the forgiving sort. That I’ve...sinned, for a lack of a better term, in ways that you cannot forget nor would you normally allow. But we are here, together, and we will be _here together_ for seven years. We need to make a truce.” 

He shoves a bite of pancake in his mouth as if he wants to smother his words like he smothered his pancakes.

Watch him across the table, catalogue the look on his face, the fervent...something in his eye and nod once. 

“Alright.” Reach for the bottle of syrup and trail rings around the melted butter. Take a bite and then another. Clear your plate under the hungry gaze of a man you loathe.

The pancakes taste delicious. 

————— 

The bunker isn't that different from what you remember. A winding series of rooms that sit in pitch darkness when not in use. Walls littered with Americana and pretty vistas torn from hunting magazines. 

Dutch’s fish seem to have multiplied since you last saw them, numerous orange and white goldfish that swarm the surface when you sprinkle fish food for them. You find yourself staring at them for hours, laid out of the old cracked leather couch in the dark living room. Blink your eyes against the gentle blue glow of the aquarium, count seven goldfish, no thirteen. Blink again and its five Nemo and a Dori. Blink again and it's a Largemouth Bass flapping its gills at you. Blink and blink and blink and see an oceans’ worth of fish. 

—————

Wander and wander and wander a loose circuit around the bunker. Each spiral finds you someplace new, someplace different. Discover a library hidden behind a cupboard door. Spend an hour gazing over the spines of books, reading titles that nearly make sense but trickle away on further inspection. Flip through pages and pages of gibberish until your brow is furrowed and your eyes are dry with the strain of trying to make sense from madness. 

Joseph always comes to you, when you’ve gotten lost in the bunker, found yourself in rooms off the blueprints. He comes for you with a soft smile and a gentle hand around your wrist and eyes that are blue like the sky, like the ocean, like the paint that has overtaken the bedroom walls.

“Would you like to pray Deputy Rook?” He always asks when he finds you, when he draws you back to the bedroom and your pile of quilts. He lays you down and sits beside you, back pressed up against the wooden dresser and he holds your hand in his.

But no, you wouldn't like to pray, and you tell him that, but he just smiles at you and brushes his hand across your face, across the top of your lip and he smells like sugar. Like summertime fairs and cotton candy, and you cannot help but chase that memory, to lick viscus sugar from your lips.

To be caught in a memory of carousels and thick Edison bulbs sending flashes of white into the corners of your eye as the wooden horse takes you round and round and round.

—————

You have been wandering the bunker again, floating from room to room as your mind wanders. It's always little thoughts, tiny thoughts, inconsequential thoughts. Your world has become so very small, child. 

You wonder why Dutch’s kitchen looks just like the Rye’s. Why when you peer inside and see the yellow walls, and soft white curtains you think: Kim and handmade sandwiches and ‘Another cookie before you go?’

You get stuck working out why the room doesn't make you think Dutch. When you would have spent time there with him...consider why it doesn't make you think of his sloppy joe goulash or shots of cheap whiskey as he patches you back up under the bright fluorescents. 

At times you wonder how Joseph managed to get grass to grow in the hallway. How he managed to get the sky to paint itself across the ceiling in the aquarium room. How he managed to disappear the door to the armory, to the War Room, even though you can still hear the persistent hum of the radio housed inside.

Ask him about it one day, when the distant rise and fall of other people's voices settles back into empty static. 

“Where do the rooms go?” You say to him, when he comes back into the bedroom to read to you another chapter of his book. 

“Rooms?” Joseph asks as he kneels beside you. Find yourself looking up to catch his gaze, pause a moment because you don't remember him being taller than you, being all that much bigger than you, but he seems oddly monumental as you look at him. Huge and powerful, and austere, like the sculptures of horse riding generals you find in old city parks.

“They just disappear sometimes.” You say, and you blink, and you find that he is right sized again. “Like the radio room… I know where it should be and I can hear it but I go looking and it's just...not there.” 

Joseph is silent for a long moment before he smiles at you calm and warm. “I asked God to hide it away. It was a distraction from what was really important, so I asked God to hide the room from you, until you were ready...”

Frown slightly at that, rub a hand across your face and blink away the light in your eyes. “Ready for what?”

He takes your hand in his and pulls it from your face. “New Eden, my child. Don't you remember? We are going to build a new world, and you will be at my side. You will be my right hand, you will help me judge the living and free them from their sin.” 

“How?”

“By freeing you from yours.”

—————

Find yourself in Hurk’s room, sprawled out on his king size bed, under sheets of hunters camo. You are laying on your side, turned towards Joseph who is sitting propped up against the headboard beside you, his legs under the covers and his hand clasped tight in yours. 

Stare past him to the open windows, gentle breeze agitating the posters tacked haphazardly to the wall and making the good luck charms on the adjoining wall sway in the breeze. Breathe deeply and enjoy the quiet sound of paper being turned as Joseph thumbs though his white covered book. 

“Do you ever think about regret?” the preacher asks you after a long moment, in which he places the book down on his lap and turns his face towards you. 

Twitch your fingers against his hand and tilt your face up, catch his eyes with yours and lose yourself for a moment in the deep blue. “Doesn't everyone? Like ‘I regret the haircut I had in seventh grade’ y know, that kind of stuff?”

He smiles at you, a quick twitch if his lip in amusement and a quiet puff of air. “A little bit deeper than that. But sure, little regrets, big regrets.”

He sighs out and his eyes wander slowly over the walls of the bedroom, but they don't settle on anything in particular. Though you know the statue of the monkey god is always a conversation starter, and the good luck charms with their handmade fervor can come off a bit serial killery if not for the pure hearted goodness you know was behind their creation. Feel for a moment, as if Joseph is not seeing the same room as you, as if he is not truly in the same place as you.

“I regret the loss of my family.” Joseph says eventually, pulling your hand more firmly into his lap and gently fiddling with your fingers. “I regret that God had to take them from me, that he wouldn't let them see the newer better world we had strived so hard to prepare for.”

Weight his words for a moment then say, “I think about the people a lot. Like…if the rest of Hope County made it through the bombs, if they got to their shelters in time. I worry about my friends, y’know? The ones who were - who were with us in the end. If they made it back safe. If they’re still alive, just counting down the days until they can leave their bunkers and go back into the world.”

“You regret their death?” Joseph asks, eyes sharpening slightly.

Shake your head fervently. “ _They aren't dead!_ ” swallow hard and breathe deep, take in that calming sugar scent that comes strongest to your nose when the Father is near. “I regret that they could have gotten hurt because of me. That maybe, they were just a bit too far from home and didn't make it back in time.” 

“I understand,” Joseph says after a pause that was just a moment too long. “You do realize though, that a lot of good people were hurt because of you. Didn't make it home in time, didn't get to their shelters in time because of you?”

Pull your hand out of his and slide it back under the covers, curl in on yourself, huddle against his words as they fall heavy on your eardrums, against the curve of your spine. “It’s not my fault.” 

“Oh my child…”Joseph sighs, “It really is. The bombs fell because you fought and you killed. People died because of your actions. Because you destroyed bunkers and removed supplies, because you killed leaders and followers, fathers and mothers and beloved children.”

He slides down so that his body is lying next to yours and your noses are maybe a hands width apart. “You need to be aware of your sins so that we may cleanse you of them. You need to be aware that your _Pride_ led to the death of millions and that your _Wrath_ killed them by your own hand.” 

He reaches for you, and tugs your hand out from under the covers, and you can see the blood on them. Heavy and so thick that you cannot see the skin beneath it. 

“You have so much sin to make up for.” Joseph tells you as the walls to Hurk’s room crumble away and the world is washed in fire.

—————

F

A

L

L

and fall until you crash land into a pit of ash and bone. Until the sky opens up like Pompeii above you, a horrific conglomeration of smoke and lightning and blazing fire. 

Push your feet into ember warm ground and rise against the thick smog that clouds your path, which fights against your legs like the tide. That hides frightful mysteries in the darkness because all you can see is the horrifying inferno in the sky. Struggle forward, and forward, pass dark shapes that stumble around in the darkness beside you but never solidify, never clear up in your vision. 

Walk and walk and walk through endless darkness, in deafening silence and pure cacophony until you open your mouth to scream out your fear and frustration and loneliness. 

Stumble though that darkness for an eternity. Scream yourself hoarse and then to silence. Your voice abandons you entirely. 

—————

Find yourself wandering through the ruins at Falls End. Shift rubble and search the intact buildings for any sign of survivors. Start at the far side of town, by Jerome’s church, and work your way toward the Spread Eagle. 

You find Jerome inside the church, or at least Jerome’s body. Tucked tight behind the pulpit, battered, worn, and marred by fire. He doesn't look like himself, after endless days of decay, but no one else would be wearing a priest’s collar and a bullet proof vest.

Tuck your arms under his corpse and move the body to the first wooden pew. Set it down on ash covered wood and feel as though you have left a piece of you behind with it. 

Leave the church and dig through the ruins of each foundation, tear your hands apart on brick, and shattered glass, pierce yourself on rusted nails and bone fragments. Pull bodies from the wreckage. Each wearing the face or marker of a person you know. Take them all back to Jerome’s church, lay them out on pews, and then between the aisle ways until the church is over run with bodies of the people you knew.

It takes you days, months, a year, two years, endless hours, and countless minutes. Lose yourself more and more with each body found, with each body placed. Until all that is left within you is the tiniest grain of sand, the rest spread between the people you fought for, the people you saved, and the people who stood by your side, but most of it, most of it went to the perfect, tiny body of Carmina Rye. 

Sit outside on the church steps when it's all done, sit and blink and watch the desolation. 

Joseph comes for you after a time, looking worn and tired in a way that was unfamiliar to you, uncomfortable for you. 

“There you are.” He says when he stops in front of you. Kneeling on the cracked concrete before you, hands tight on your knees and eyes boring into your own. “I’ve been trying-”

He cuts himself off, frowning marring his features. “You have been very hard to reach. I was worried.”

“I didn't go anywhere.” You respond with a sigh, “I’ve been right here.”

“Here? Where is here?”

Scowl at him and thrust your hand pointedly down the rubble streets. “Falls End. Where do you think this is?” 

“Of course. Okay. Deputy, I need you to listen? Can you do that for me? I need you to wake up for me now? Okay? I need you to _wake up.”_

His hands are tight on your shoulders and they shake you roughly. 

“But Joseph,” You bat at his hands, get him to stop his frantic convulsion. “I am awake.”

“No Rook, you're not, you’re really not. You went too deep-”

—————

The bombs are falling. The bombs are falling and you have nowhere to go, nowhere to move. You can only stare up up up as the sky ignites and the world burns.

The world burns and you hear a voice begging.

“ _Deputy please! You need to eat!”_

Your skin

“ _Wake up!”_

ignites

“ _The Bliss - It’s just-”_

and you burn

“ _I can’t do this alone!”_

to your bones, to ash, to nothingness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please drop me a line. I'd love to hear what you think!


	2. The Crypt

—————

Chapter II

—————

_ “You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.” _

**_The Things they Carried_ **

Wake up in a dark room that smells heavily of decay. Choke on it, that grotesquely putrid smell of a corpse in too small of a space. Gag on it until your body is heaving, hacking up acid in the pitch darkness. Cough and struggle for breath, struggle to move on limbs like toothpicks, on muscles that burn with the slightest of movement. 

Press your nose into your shoulder and try and breathe through the cotton of your shirt, to trick your body into thinking you are taking in clean air and not just oxegen heavy with death. 

Breath once, twice, a third time. Gather energy and reach a hand forward and out, feel around blindly in the dark, try and feel out a wall, or a bit of rock, for anything to give you a marker in the pitch black. Find nothing, feel nothing, take a moment to breathe into your shoulder then get your hands and knees under you. Heave yourself up with difficulty and crawl a few inches forward like a child. 

Reach out again, swing your hand before you and that's when you find it. The body. Your fingers hit mushy meat and solid bone and you shriek. Use the last burst of energy to shove yourself away, far to the side, and collide with a cinderblock wall. 

“Fuck! Fuck!” You scream, scrubbing your hand against the soft material of your pant leg. Gag and sob and wail into the darkness. 

It is then you hear a metallic clattering, a series of rumbles coming from your right and in an instant the area is flooded with light. Cry out against the onslaught, pressing your hands tight against your face as frantic footsteps approach you. 

A body collides with your own, and hands flutter over your arms, your neck , your face, before settling tight around your ribcage and squeezing tight. 

“Oh god.” The man says, “I thought you were dead, I thought I lost you.” 

Then their hands are pulling yours from your face, and your eyes stutter and water, and you catch sight of Joseph Seed’s blue blue eyes before he pulls you over his shoulder in a fireman's carry and stumbles out of the room. With your head resting against his back, you get a perfect view of the corpse before Joseph carries you away. 

It’s Dutch. It’s Dutch and he’s been dead for a long, long time. 

—————

Joseph sets you gently down on the cot in the bedroom and he falls to his knees before you. He reaches for you like you are something to be worshiped, something to be cherished and places gentle hands on either side of your head and tips your head down so that your forehead comes to rest against his. You can feel his breath stutter against your chin and the tears that fall from his face and wet your shirt. 

“You were dead. You were dead.” He sobs and clutches and holds you to him like you would disappear into the ether should he relinquish his grip.

You can feel the bruises forming against your too thin skin. Slide a dry tongue across parched lips and struggle to form words. “W-what h-hap-”

“The Bliss took you.” Joseph says and you can hear his throat click as he swallows. “It took you and I couldn’t get you back. In my hubris I thought...I am so sorry.”

He leans away from you and you can see a gauntness to his face, a touch of insanity in his eye. “God has given you back to me. Oh my Child. My child. Forgive me please, I never meant to harm you, I just wanted you to see.”

Draw your tongue across your lips again, try and form some spit in the desert of your mouth. “Water?” You rasp and Joseph is on his feet in an instant.

“Yes. yes of course, wait here. I’ll get it.” He says as he darts from the room into the pitch black hall. 

Weave and duck like a drunkard until the process of keeping your body upright proves too stressful for your limbs and you slump sideways onto the cot. Dark spots crawl across your vision and the simple act of breathing seems to be too much of a task to keep going.

Pass out before he returns. Lose yourself to the darkness.

—————

Loose track of time. Remember things only in snapshots, your life taken in polaroid pictures of a fluttering eye. Wake only in brief instances, long enough to swallow whatever water or broth Joseph can trickle down your throat, to twitch against the long stroke of hands down your back, or fingers through your hair, a thumb over your cheekbone. 

Wake enough to protest hands that peel you out of soiled clothes, that clean your skin with a damp cloth, and rearrange your atrophied body. Wake enough to register the constant soft voiced muttering of a man deep in prayer.

Wake enough to know that you fall back into darkness. 

—————

Watch the sky burn. Watch it ignite like tissue paper and see fire chase holes across the atmosphere. Look back when you hear the screaming. Look back and see the contorted faces of people you once knew, who you once loved and loved you in return. 

“How could you do this?” Jess Black, her mouth a cavern, her teeth dripping with venom.

“You let this happen!?” Jerome from where he is hung over the door to his church like a crucifix.

“All your fault.” Sharky, Addie, Hurk from where they stand in the street, a three headed gorgon.

“You were supposed to protect us.” Mary May as she burns from the inside.

“You failed.” Eli, bleeding from the multiple bullet wounds you put in his chest. He watches you with one eye and one eye socket that became a star shaped hole. “You killed us instead.”

He reaches for you, they all reach for you, and their hands tear into your skin like Peaches’ claws through a Peggie. They tear you apart, they rip you limb from limb.

They want to hear you scream and who are you to deny them.

—————

“Wake up!” cries the voice.

“Wake up,” they plead. Despite the raggedness of their claws, their hands only touch your shoulders, your neck, your face -- softly, lightly, like moths flying into a window screen. 

Gasp for air and bat weakly at the hands touching you until you have caught wrists with the strength of a newborn chick. They freeze in your grasp. 

“You’re okay.” Joseph says, holding still as you blink the fear from your eyes, as your hands shake and then fall away from his. And it is a comfort to see his face, hated though it is, is free from accusation, from the warped horror of your nightmare. “You’re okay, it’s just a dream.”

He shushes you then, wiping the sweat from your brow and gently hovering over you, like a nursemaid, or a specter of your mother. 

Swallow hard, and heave out a stress filled breath. 

“Shh, shh, you’re alright.” He soothes and you feel yourself relaxing, falling back onto the lumpy cot and into tangled sheets. 

Struggle for a moment to gather your wits enough to speak. Settle for a questioning grunt and hope he gets the message. 

Joseph just blinks down at you, from where he’s perched awkwardly at the side of the cot, hip and leg pressed against your side, torso twisted so his arms can frame your face as he looks over you. “You want some water?”

Tip your chin up and wait as he leans around you to pull a water bottle from the ground. He feeds it slowly into your mouth, though you can't help but chase the plastic edge as he pulls it away. 

“You’ll get sick.” He says, as he stretches his arm out away from your weakly grasping hands. “You always get sick, little Lazarus, please. We have to take this slow.”

Whine at his words, and try to force your arms under you, to lift up, and sit to better grab at the water bottle but fail before you even start. Collapse into yourself and pant for breath. Twitch your fingers against rough cotton and wonder at your place on the cot. Wonder where Joseph has been sleeping if not for his bed. 

“I’ll take care of you, child,” Joseph says as he tips the water back towards your face. “My sins are my own, and I will repent.”

—————

Time is meaningless. To you it is a thimble full of water, carefully allocated bites of food, and the Father. The Father who has taken to staring at you like you hold the key to the universe within your hands, like you are something precious, something beloved, something holy.

Gain your strength back slowly. Teeter around the room on shaking legs, and hold your twig thin arms close to your chest, fearful that they would break should you fall. Joseph hovers at your side, an ever present nursemaid, eyes forever on you like a parent with an unruly toddler. 

It should concern you more than it does, his obsessive regard, but you find yourself too exhausted to care. Too exhausted to think much even, beyond the craving for your next meal, your next nap, your next nightmare. The next time Joseph will wake you from tourtured sleep with a gentle hand and quiet voice. Until you are comforted like a frightened horse in the softness of his presence 

Forget for a time, that you need to carve a tally mark into the scarring of your arm. To raise that number to fifty four. Forget that, until you are seated on the shower floor, scrubbing yourself with a sliver of soap as water rains down from high above you. 

Forget for long hours, for endless days, possibly even for months, that you are like this because you died. Because you died and you didn’t reset. 

Realize this and crumble within your own mind.

—————

Despite his kindness, despite Joseph's words and gestures and gentleness. Despite the promise of safety his conternance brings . . . the realization nags you like a persistent itch. Joseph is sure you died, tells you again and again that he checked your pulse, and held a mirror before your mouth to catch a sign of your breath, but came up empty. All signs pointed toward death.  _ Dead dead _ , dead as a doornail dead. The kind of dead people dont come back from.

He buried you as best he could in a concrete jail. Read you your last rights, blessed you with oils (from the kitchen nonetheless) and buried you with Dutch in the hall closet turned moseluim.

You laid there, at rest (dead as dead could be) for four days until you miraculously returned to life. 

“You are Lazarus reborn.” Joseph whispers into the skin of your wrist one morning. “I had thought myself alone, I thought God had taken this final punishment for my failures, but then you returned to me.”

He kisses your wrist then but lets your hand go when you tug it away, still wary of his presence, of his hawklike regard.

“You are meant for this.” Joseph assures you, standing from his kneeling position at your bedside, “God has returned you to me to prove that while we strayed from his guidance we are not lost to his teaching.”

Joseph leaves you then, picking up the notebook that so rarely leaves his sight these days and wanders out of the room.

Swear quietly under your breath, shift on the bed and close your eyes. Breathe deep, and pretend for a moment you are not the sole captive of a mad man, that your darkest secret has been revealed to the last person on earth you wished to know it. The person first in line to misuse it. 

Then wonder why you are still here for him to remember.

You have never failed to reverse through time with each of your deaths. You had never failed to restart at a fixed point, to be able to move forward, to try again. Even your next closest death, the fifty third had not varied from that pattern, though it had stuttered backwards though the events leading up to you swallowing those pills until you found yourself dumped back in Jacobs hands. 

Wonder for a moment, if whatever it is that causes this, this reset, this time loop is running out of power. If you are running out of time, out of favor, out of chances. 

Wonder if your next death will be your last death. If this is your final attempt, your final chance to make things right.

Wonder if you haven't failed your way out of grace. If you haven't messed up your chance of saving the people of Hope County so badly, that any further attempts at the matter have been removed from you entirely. 

Wonder if your dreams are correct. If the end of the world, the state you find yourself in, really was your fault.

—————

On the fourteenth day after you failed to rewind Joseph unlocks the cuff around your wrist, then he unlocked the cuff attached to the metal bed frame and drops them and the key to unlock them onto the bedside table. 

He stands before you, hands loose at his sides before he reaches for you. Hands on your shoulders, tilting you forward to accept his forehead pressed to yours. 

Stay there for an endless moment, counting breaths and the faint breeze from his twitching eye lashes until he pulls away. 

Pulls away and looks at you with eyes full of sorrow and a terrible longing that never fails to make you squirm. 

“I cannot offer you freedom, my Child, not true freedom. Not like you want it. But the Bunker is yours. Go where you wish, do what you will, but know this. There is nothing on that radio for you. There is no one to speak to that is not of Eden's Gate. Know that the food we have is limited. Your friend Dutch was not prepared for a seven year lockdown. You cannot eat, but for what I give you or we will starve.” 

His eyes have not left yours, his stare has been burning through your retinas into the back of your brain.

“Do you understand, my child?”

Duck your head and cut your focus down to your shaking hands. The skeletal digits wrapped tight in thin skin and elevated veins. “Yes Father.” 

—————

You lose track of time. God you have lost track of so much time.

The end of the hallway is packed tight in opened containers. Neat stacks, stretching five feet back, climb high towards the ceiling. They block the room at the end of the hall. A storage room once. Now empty but for one body. 

Tally marks are chalked into the hallway, just outside the bedroom door. They stretch like tin soldiers in groups of five. Count each batch slowly, tapping your fingers into your palm with each grouping of five until you have reached a hundred, then two hundred, then three hundred, a year. Keep counting until you settle at six hundred and forty three.

Break that down in your head. Break it down until you have twenty one months and then press your fist to your mouth to stifle the ragged gasp that comes tearing its way out of you. 

Sink down on failing knees until you are hedged up against the wall and trembling.

Trembling. Trembling.

No one has come for you. No one has called for you.

You have been left here. All alone. Forgotten. 

—————

You have your freedom and you hardly know what to do with it. The bunker is smaller now than you remembered, smaller without the Bliss. Gone are the multitude of rooms, the libraries hidden behind closet doors, the grass that grows from concrete, the Rye’s Kitchen, Hurk’s Bedroom, the door to the one room bunker where you and Grace…

The fish are dead. Have been dead. Are long dead. Have rotted inside their glass walls, have turned to translucent skeletons adorning multicolored pebbles. Stare at them and the orange bottle that once held their flake food and try and remember what species they were. 

Pick up the small bottle, gone empty and stare at the image printed on its front. It has no answers. 

—————

Time moves so slowly. Days creep past in an unhurried shuffle. Each unseen rotation of the sun leading you closer and closer to your release, but farther and farther, from the person you had once been.

There is no reclaiming the body you once had, long gone are the hard earned muscles, the athleticism. You are a shadow of yourself, a shadow cast in Joseph's image, long and stretched as though caught in a setting sun.

He’s taking everything from you. Took everything from you.

The freedom he has given you is false, his kindness misleading, his restrictions unbearable.

The radio room is off limits, has always been off limits,but now you cannot even hear the sound of distant sermons. You can hear Joseph's voice droning on and on behind the closed door but the returning speech of his followers has gone silent. There is nothing but Joseph and his Word even when you lay on the concrete outside the locked door and press the shell of your ear to the crack between rooms. 

You cannot feed yourself, cannot bathe yourself, think by yourself without his say so, without his solemn gaze and false parenthood. He touches you softly, gently, like you are a fragile thing. Like you are glass boned and featherdown and not a man who once waged war against his family. 

He is killing you with kindness. Smothering you in gentleness. Stealing away all your sharp edges.

—————

He presses a notebook into your hands, college ruled and half used. Dutch’s shambling scrawl tumbling down the pages, subject matter heartbreaking in its normality.

“You have never liked me” Joseph says to you from across the linoleum table. “I know that. I can even accept that. But Lazaraus, I cannot help but worry. You need to speak with someone, and I know you don't want that person to be me, so just...let it out on paper instead?”

Stare at him then look down at the meager spread that is your daily meal. Stale salt crackers and a few flakes of canned tuna. 

“Please my child…” Joseph says, “Just try it.”

Seed has not called you by name since your resurrection. 

—————

There are thirty four unused pages in the notebook if you count both front and back. Forty eight pages to bare your soul, to write out your anger and your pain and your hate. Enough pages to do damage. Enough pages to tell your story, to write a letter to each of your friends and a few others besides so that they may know what became of you after the collapse. How you lived, how you survived, how you feared. 

There are enough pages.

Ten minutes after Joseph handed you the notebook you drop it onto the cot that has once again become his bed. Leave it for him to find. For him to see.

Forty eight pages, all filled, marked in heavy handed pencil and with a single capital letter. 

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKE DEPUTY ROOK A DULL BOY

—————

The Food is running out. It is nineteen days past the New Year of 2021 and you have fasted your way into starvation. You had helped Joseph stack plastic crates all day yesterday, condensing them down and freeing space in the hallway. Each empty but for a few bug carcasses and food crumbs. The empty containers are stacked in front of Dutch’s crypt, once packed tight with MREs, there is now but one weeks worth left.

“God is testing us.” Joseph says from where he hovers over the fourteen plastic wrapped packages.

“He is testing us.” He says again, as he looks up at you, eyes ghastly in the stuttering light of the dying bulb. 

“Are you going to turn water to wine?” You ask him, distantly amused. The thought that this is how Joseph Seed is going to die amuses you. Starved to death in a bunker, trapped with someone who hates him. Turnabout is fair play after all. “Make a feast out of a club cracker and a can of tuna and eat well for the next four years?” 

“No.” He shakes his head, the mousy brown of his hair grown out and stringy as it escapes his bun. “I will not be turning two fish into a meal for five thousand.” His teeth gleam in the fluorescent light, monstrous and treacherous. “But you will.”

—————

The thing about Joseph, about The Father, is that he has been blessed with a silver tongue. He is a man who can and has talked whores into church, won followers from all aspects of society, and built himself a legion on words alone. For all that you hate him, you must admit he is pervasive, persuasive, and overly perceptive. And when he sees the warriness in your eye, and the fear rising in your body, he takes your hand in his and puts that silver tongue to work.

“There are certain things that men must do for the good of the whole.” Joseph says to you as he pressed clothing into your arms.

“We will starve, you will starve, again and again and again, and God did not raise you from the dead to torture you like that. I know he did not. He is not a cruel Father, He loves you just as I love you, my child.”

His tone is so very gentle, his eyes so very piercing, so very blue, like the clearest of water, the most summer of skies. He takes your hand in his, and you want to pull away, to move back, but for weeks and weeks his hands have been on you, gentle and soft and caring, and it feels so natural to just let his palms rest there against your skin as his eyes peer into yours, snake like and hypnotising.

“I need you to step up, to carry the burden that only you are capable of lifting. I have had visions of New Eden and I have seen you within those gates. You shall be a provider and a protector, my child. My Lazarus, and I need you,  _ we _ need you to take up that mantle today.”

“Joseph.” You protest, the words falling weakly beneath the onslaught of his speech, “The radiation-”

You do not know how long it takes for nuclear fallout to clear. The clean up and care of nuclear sites was never part of your training, your education, your interest. But this day, you sorely wish it was. 

You have dressed in triple layers. In thick rubber boots, and nylon mittens and wrapped your face in balaclavas and ski goggles. You are wrapped up tight, and heavy, like a tick about to pop, in layers of waterproofed outerwear and plastic bags. 

Joseph has given you a hunting knife, a BIC lighter and a bottle of water, and he expects you to bring home salvation. 

“You're insane.” You tell him through muffled lips. “You’ll kill me.”

The  _ again _ goes unspoken. 

“Do not fear. God will protect you, God will keep you safe. As he has kept you safe against my Chosen, We are meant to walk this earth, into Eden, together. Only you may do what needs to be done,to do what no other is capable of, what I am not capable.”

Press your eyes closed, and pull your hand away, stoke up that fire inside you, the one that's fueled by spite and shove the softness of his touch inside it. Use it as a feast for those banked flames.

“I hope I die out there.” You tell him, looking down into his eyes, “I hope I die out there, and I don't resurrect. I hope you starve to death in this bunker. Alone and forgotten, and when I find you in Hell, I will be the first one to rip your soul to pieces.”

You shove him away and turn towards the heavy metal door, you spin the lock and hear Seed scuttle away from the entryway, slamming the metal door shut and leaving you to your fate. 

You spin the lock, and shove your weight against the heavy metal and you step into the wasteland.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter too much longer to finish than expected. To thank you for all waiting so patiently I decided to split this fic into 3 chapters, and post this early. With luck I will have a faster turn around. My job ended up being essential, and work was crazy over quarantine and did not allow for much creative time. Thank you all for your patience, and thank you very much for reading. I cant wait to hear what you think.


	3. The Wasteland

—————

Chapter III

—————

_“Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep...”_

**John Milton, Paradise Lost** ****

It is winter in Montana. Nuclear winter but winter all the same.

The tall pine trees that line the path to Dutch’s bunker are heavy with snow, their boughs drooping and brushing the ground. Your feet crunch against powdery flakes, the rubber of your boots doing a great job at repelling the snowmelt but doing a shit job at insulating your toes. Already, you can feel the chill sinking into the base of your feet. 

You are outside. You are outside and you are crying, sobbing thick tears into the cotton of your ski mask, choking on the snot that pours from your nose and over your beard. It is beautiful, it is beautiful. It is so...empty.

It is empty. Empty but for the burnt trunks and the shell of the truck you had raced here for salvation. The windows are frosted, covered in layers of ice and snow and leaves, and small indents of birds feet that crawl up the windshield. You wonder if you brush away the snow from the passengers' side window if you will find Earl Whitehorse slumped in the seat, if Joey and Staci will be collapsed on the bench seat in back. Snug and tight in their deputy greens and laid out asleep like children. You wonder if they are corpses, dessicated by time and ravaged by animals, or bones burnt by the fires of wrath and mankind's folly. 

You wonder and you wonder and you are disgusted by yourself. The thoughts that have started to spin round and round in your mind. Directionless, and morbid, and so, so worthless. 

You have a knife, and a bottle of water, and impending radiation poisoning. You might as well make the most of it. 

The snow has fallen hard this year. The banks raising up past your belly button, high and stiff and heavily packed at the bottom from months worth of snowfall. It is a struggle to ford it. Made harder by your branch thin limbs, and the unwieldiness of your clothing. Struggling as you are through the drifts there is no way you would be able to catch a meal. Not with a four inch knife, and a desperate prayer. 

There is a bunker, you know, down by the water, that has a recurve bow hidden in its frigid depths. Assuming no one looted it, that its owner had not returned to claim the property as the bombs fell, and that the bowstring is still intact, you will have a better chance at hunting with arrows. Not that you think there will be much to hunt.

The air around you has been silent since you breached the surface. There has been no distant birdcall, no crunch of foot in the forest aside from the labored wracket of your own movement. You are well and truly alone. The world is yours, and it is empty. 

It takes you half the day to travel the three miles between Dutch’s Bunker and the Silver Lake boat lock. Three miles that leaves you exhausted, frozen to the core, and with growing nausea.

The lake has frozen over, ice thick and blue and laced with white ribbons of trapped air bubbles. It is an easy thing to break into the boat lock, by walking onto the ice and carefully stepping your way inside, wary of the thinner ice near the piers and under the docks roof. The garage door that used to keep it closed seems to have been blown off in the blast, and chunks of ripped aluminum are scattered throughout the U-shaped deck.

You slip and slide in your rubber rain boots but manage to keep your footing as you heave yourself onto the worn wooden planks. It is cooler slightly in the shade of the roof, though warmer too without the cutting wind. 

You snatch the keys to the bunker from the hook by the door, and open the circuit box and pray that whatever generator is used to feed the thing is still running. If it's not, if it's destroyed by the bomb, or simply out of juice, you are going to have a very dark, very cold swim in your future. 

You flip the switch and it falls with an empty sort of snap. The red light circuit remains dull. 

You swear quietly under your breath, pressing the heels of your gloved hands against the orange plastic of your ski goggles. The pressure against your face is muted, but it is enough.

The sun will be setting like it always does in midwinter, early and without remorse. Temperatures will drop, and you have nothing to eat to help fuel your body through the long night. 

But the bunker does, if you can swim through the freezing water, and find your way through the dark underwater cavern. If you can manage to live through the hypothermia there should be enough canned goods stocked away to feed you over the course of the next few days. Feed you long enough and well enough that you can leave Dutch’s island, leave Joseph, and see if you can find any other survivors.. You just have to be smart about this.

It is a thirty yard walk between the boat dock and the submerged bunker. The path piled high with snow, that will turn a normally easy jaunt into a half hour trek. Drenched as you will be coming out of the bunker, it is too long to spend in the elements. Especially if you don't pack the snow down into a proper path. If you manage to do that, and you leave your clothes in the boat dock, where they can remain dry, you have a chance of making it through this alive. If you can leave your clothes in the boat dock and have a fire waiting...well. 

A bit of searching leads you to a metal toolbox, the sides paper thin and painted aluminum but hopefully thick enough to withstand a small fire. A bit more of a search turns up a camping lantern, a canvas boat cover, and enough old bird’s nests to use as kindling. You will have to search through the snow for downed branches, and pray you can find enough old losses to last through the night.

Packing down the snow between the two buildings and gathering enough downed branches takes the rest of the afternoon, the sun falling in the sky and your clothes soaked through with sweat by the time you have enough twigs and branches piled inside the dock door. Your stomach is crawling against your spine and the lone bottle of water spared to you has been empty for hours.

On the last trip back and forth between the bunker and the boathouse, you had dug out the bunker door, and unlocked it. The heavy metal door swinging open to show a dark pit, chill and empty as you stared down into it, the musty smell of lakewater rising from below. 

The sun is starting to set as you build up your fire, easing the bird nests and kindling alive with patient hands and a sparking lighter, you breathe life into it and slowly add in larger branches, until it’s burning strong and eating away at one of the larger branches you had found. 

You strip down with trepidation, piling your clothes atop the black plastic trash bags that had acted as your outerwear. You strip down until you are shaking in the cold, nude but for your feet which had been hastily shoved back into the rubber boots, you lean down, pick up the lantern, and you make your way to the bunker.

The wind is bitterly cold, howling, slashing, cutting into your skin. It tears at your too long hair, your beard, the soft and gentle parts of you. Despite the shaky limbed jog you fall into, the bunker is tremendously far away. 

When you reach its concrete steps, your beard has frozen in clumps from the puffs of vapor that escaped your mouth, your fingers, lips, and ears are red and frigid, and your hands struggle to turn the knob of the camplight as you take the first step into the bunkers depths.

The light, once you manage it, illuminates the placid waters of the flooded bunker, the surface filmed with the barest crest of ice which breaks when you place a rubber soled foot against it. 

Take a moment, a few long monuments to breathe deep, to stare into the dark depths and wonder if it's really worth it. If the promise of a few canned goods, and a bow that may be intact is enough to risk your life in frigid waters. 

Your brain tells you no, but your stomach cries out yes. 

Toe off the boots, place reddened toes against the arctic concrete and lay down the lantern a few steps above. Breath deep again, and dive into the water. 

Be hit, instantly with the mind numbing realization that it is _cold._ So fucking cold you cannot help the involunary gasp that steals away your oxygen and fills your mouth with stagnant water. Cannot help the way your limbs seize and shake and the sudden struggle it is to reach for the surface and breach it.

Breathe deep, breathe deep and fight the urge to rush for the stairs, to make for the boathouse and the fire and anything but this dark and frigid grave.

Breathe deep, breathe deep and dive, dive and swim towards the best of your fading memory the location of the recurve bow. Swim hard to the right, arm out until you hit the wall, and follow the path of it down and in until your fingers hit pegboard and your lungs burn with the pressure as you feel around blindly.

Lose endless seconds, as you grope in the darkness, loose air bubbles though your nose as your ribs grow tight and your lungs beg. Grab hold of fiberglass, and shove away from the wall. Paddle madly until you breach the surface. Gasp and heave your torso onto the first concrete step out of the water, drop the bow alongside the lantern and pant. Pant and shiver and rest the fatigue growing in your limbs, that bleeds acid along your narrow muscles, up your chest and into your lungs. Feel your hair freeze and clump as ice settles, as your body grows numb to the water against your legs, and shove yourself back down, follow the same path to the utility bench, feel blindly for fiberglass arrows and when your lungs burn, and the darkness encroaching on your vision isn't from the cavern alone, swim back to the surface. 

Go back down again and again, fumble your way across the workbench, struggle to close your frozen fingers around the narrow shafts of the arrows, get lost in the long dark hall when you go searching for cans. Knock against the plastic pvc shelving and send the whole contraption tipping towards the ground. Swim back for the surface to take a new breath before you can return for the cans you just scattered. Paw them into your struggling limbs and push off icy concrete and kick hard for the surface. Drop those six cans and plastic jars by the scattered pile of thirteen arrows and cough up the pressure in your lungs. 

Pull yourself out of the water on shaking limbs, lose yourself for endless seconds, as you stare into the shadows on the stairs and tremble the water off your limbs. Blink yourself awake and struggle to get a hold on the stock of the bow. Fit the bow with difficulty over your shoulder and let it hang across your narrow chest by its bowstring. Fumble up the arrows, fill your shivering arms with jars, and shove your feet into the waiting boots. Catch the handle of the lantern between your teeth and stumble out into the night.

Walk with numb skin, and watering eyesight through a fog of snow and your own encroaching mind. Forget as you struggle forward, where you are, why you are, until it is just the simple motion of the forward stumble and the yawning dark of the open door. It calls to you, as you get closer, like a mouth of hell, dark yet burning with a flickering light. You want it, no _need_ it. Have to have the safety of that deep and yearning hole.

Come back to yourself on your knees before the fire, cans dropped in a haphazard scatter around your legs, arrow shafts digging into your palms as you lean over the cracking flame, still working its way through the first thick log. Pull your arms around your chest and scatter the bow and arrows against the wall when your limbs refute your commands in jerky movements.

Force stiff fingers to pull the canvas boat cover up across your back and huddle over the fire with the canvas draped over your arms like wings, use it to filter the heat against your frozen body and blink away the darkness that flashes before your eyes.

Loose track of yourself, in the fluttering beat of your pulse, in the flickering of your eyesight, the iciness of your skin.

The fire needs feeding.

Reach out with clumsy hands and bring more wood to the flame, breath slow and shallow as the wet wood flares and smoke rises. Sink slowly to the cold wooden floor. Lay there with your ear pressed to the planks and hear the distant sloshing of water. 

Blink slowly until darkness takes you, your body succumbing without even a shiver.

—————

Sharky is sitting across the campfire, staring at you with eyes like black pits and a mouth of crumbling ash. 

“Best you put some more wood on that fire, bromigo.” 

He brushes his hands across the worn fabric of his sweatshirt, wiping at the ingrained dirt, and old blood that marrs the screenprint of ‘what are you smiling at’ across his chest. That done he turns his vacant stare back at you. “I mean it dude, ‘s cold.”

“Why don't… why don't you do it then?” You ask, forcing your eyes open from where they had fallen shut in the night. Only to find the boat dock empty, your face and body freezing beneath the waxed canvas, and the small fire burned down to embers.

It is just you. Just you, like it's been for the past three years. Swear once, and heartfelt, clench your eyelids tight and pull back the tears you feel forming under them. Breathe once and reach an arm out from under the canvas and snag your pile of clothes. Pull them on carefully, sheltering blue tinted extremities and frozen limbs, hide the reddening of your skin and the blisters that developed in the night. 

Shove more kindling into the cooler, and wake them with a spark from your lighter. Wait for it to catch before feeding more wood, and pulling your iced over water bottle and reclaimed cans closer to the flames. Sit there until the ice in your water and in your veins has melted and use the hunting knife to break into the first of the unlabeled cans.

Slurp down the canned tomatoes even though they are half frozen, devour them with a speed and intensity that leaves you startled and a leftover sense of confusion when you find the can empty, and your mouth devoid of any memory of flavor. Wipe your tongue across your teeth, chase after the iron bitterness of uncooked tomato and find nothing but chilled flesh. Drop the can beside your small fire, and lay back beneath the canvas. Huddle there until the first stirrings of dawn peak through the open mouth of the dock, and a distant bird chirps to greet the sun.

—————

Leave the shack in the midmorning, when your small pile of branches has run dry and you are as warm as you are possibly going to get.

The snow overnight has gained a hard crust, thick enough to hold weight for a long second before crumbling underfoot. It makes walking difficult, adds an extra step to the motion, a secondary hitch of dragging your foot though that frozen crust with each step forward. You know without a doubt, that any miles you gain will take three times as long to travel and eat up just as much energy. Sweat is already building under your layers by the time you make it from the door of the boat shack to the shoreline.

The sand and mud that usually breaks from the water’s edge is thickly iced over, choppy with the signs of old animal tracks, heavy hooves and paws churning the muck into hard craters. It is slick and slippery, but lacking the deep exhaustion of traversing through three foot snow banks, and gives you a better line of sight than the thick press of trees around the cabin. 

Walk carefully, ignoring the persistent nausea growing in the pit of your stomach, and travel north along the shoreline, keeping your eyes peeled for tracks in the snow, fresh or otherwise, as well as any driftwood that you may stumble across. 

Wood you figure, is going to be one of the hardest things to find this far into winter. Any branches downed in the summer would be covered by snowfall, any felled trees impossible to use without first finding an axe. There may be wood at the Rangers station, you figure, wood and supplies, and a building with four complete walls. Assuming of course, that the wood didn't burst into flame when the bombs fell, that the walls did not collapse under the pressure of that same explosion,and that others had not raided it before you. That this island is inhabited by no one but you and Joseph.

It is a lot of ifs. A lot of maybes, and supposes, and you hate that you don't know more,that the facts cannot be laid out before you in neat little lines, of you know, is known, has been and will be known. 

You feel like a deep space explorer, the first to step out onto an unknown planet. It is terrifying.

The first sign of life you come across is a frozen over paw print, large and shapeless after being frozen and melted, but deep enough and familiar enough a shape for you to know. Bear. 

A bear midwinter is a bear out of hibernation is a bear that is _starving_. 

Trail you eyes up the shuffling tracks until you lose them in the thickening wood. They aren't fresh persay, though it is hard to know how exactly you should date them, without a better knowledge of the weather patterns. That they are still new enough to be seen, that they haven't been filled in by new snowfall, means that they are new enough. That the bear may still be around.

Shuffle for a second, as cold wind whips across the frozen ice and cuts into your back. Watch the forest and trail frozen fingers to the arrows you have stuck through the front of your trash bag coat, like rungs of a ladder up the front of your chest. Know that those arrows won't be enough to deter a truly hungry bear. One who was so starved it woke up before the spring thaw, and had to hunt the winter months for survival. 

Dutch’s island no longer feels safe. 

Wish for the first time that you were alone.

—————

There is a blizzard brewing, you can smell it in the deepening crispness of the air, the slightly metallic tang to the oxygen like the condensed smell of a deep freeze, you can see it in the paper white sky and the way the sun has abandoned the clouds.

You have given up walking the shoreline in favor of finding branches. You hack skinny limbs from trees with your belt knife, dig deep through snow at the bases of needle like trunks and hope to strike gold.

You have little success in the end. By the time the first flurry of snow falls, you have three dry branches, a soaked piece of driftwood and armloads of green ones. Pile them all on the far arm of the U-shaped boat dock, and head back out into the falling snow to cut as many branches from the surrounding trees as your dulling knife will allow. 

Do this until the snow comes in sheets around you and you lose yourself in a wall of white for long staggering minutes as you search for the shelter. Crash into the building and huddle against it, shift one arm out from under the pile of branches and feel around for the door knob as you stumble along the wall. Burn your hand on the cold metal when you finally grasp it and trip your way inside, drop branches with a softened clatter and shove your whole body weight against the door to force it closed. Hope that the deadbolt, once slid home, will keep the door in place. 

It is dark in the boat dock, dark and cold as the three walls fail to keep out the entirety of the wind and snow. Swear under your breath and pray that the wind doesn't change direction, that it won't blow instead directly into your open faced shelter. 

Fall to your knees beside the metal cooler you have been using for a fire pit and feed the dying coals at its base. Breathe life into them with air and kindling and pine needles that when burnt make the air smell like christmas, make your brain chase after the thought of turkey dinners and your mom who use to burn pine scented candles on Christmas morning and all throughout the season because she hated the way the air would grow stiff and thick in the endless winter days.

Breathe deep and huddle over the struggling flame until the warmth returns to your fingers and an early night is forced upon you.

—————

The boat dock is an imperfect shelter. Which honestly, no shit. It's wooden, with a tin roof, open at one end, and has a lake of ice crawling through its center. There is no insulation, just thin wooden planks with cracks between them which air and snow both sneak through, and it doesn't even support the boat for which it was built. 

You could have picked a better shelter, picked a better time to run out of food, picked a better time to strike out on your own and wait for Joseph to starve to death.

You should have just killed him. You should have just…

You tear the place apart. Pull down all the boxes from the high shelves and all the objects suspended by hooks across the ceiling. Build yourself a lean-to out of three oars and the boat canvas. Pad it with life jackets and foam buoys you pulled from a plastic tub and hunker down underneath the cloth as you pry open locked boxes and frozen lids with abandon.

Find yourself blessed with an assortment of odds and ends. The smallest of the plastic boxes, a fishing tackle box, is immediately the most useful. It’s little partitioned cubbies are filled with rolls of fishing line, hooks, and sinkers, and bait, from cheap rubber facsimiles of life to more impressive fly fishing lures of strung feathers. 

Take half an hour of your time to step onto the frozen ice, within the empty space of the U and drill down into it with a hand auger. Keep drilling and drilling until you have worked up a freezing sweat and have made a gaping hole about a foot wide. String some of the line, with a hook and sinker, and tie the other end to one of the wooden posts that line the dock. Press a rubber fish to the end of the hook and feed it into the freezing water. Twitch the line every so often with a callused finger and hope that it will soon go taut. 

Eat a can of sloppy joe filling heated by its proximity to the fire, lay atop your bed of life preservers and press your eyes closed. Pray that sleep will fight off the nausea that has been brewing in your stomach and the headache that has sprung quietly behind your eyes. Try to sleep and wait for it to get better.

Wait and wait and wait.

—————

The blizzard lasts for three days and makes you burn through your supply of wood and the gathered food until it is just you and a jar of peanut butter and a fishing line that has attracted nothing more substantial than a nibble.

On the third day, the final day, when the snow still falls in heavy roaring winds, and the mouth of your boat dock is slowly being enclosed by a bank of snow Mary May comes to you.

She sits across the fire and stares at your prone form on the pile of lifejackets and she sighs in that quiet way of hers. The way she would when it was late at night and the bar was empty but for you and Jerome, when she didn't have to put on a strong facade, or a bright face, where she could let the wear of the day play across her features, because she didn't have to lie, not to you, not to the pastor. 

“Dad used to have a fishing shack like this.” She says, her fingers brushing across the last pine needle branch by the fire. “We’d go out, every weekend when he was done with his long hauls, and sit by the bank of the lake, just us and our rods, and we’d fish, and talk, and just catch up. He, my brother and I -- We used to be happy, you know… long before all of this, long before you and your Sara ever moved here. It was different then, when Fall’s End was just a quiet town and Hope County was just a blip on the map of Montana.”

“Why did you stop?” You ask her, through teeth that chatter and a tongue that tastes vaguely of blood and stomach acid.

“Why do we ever stop?” She says in return, tilting her head just so, and you can see the red red black of her skin where her hair has burnt away and the bone peaks through. “We grew up, got older, we changed, Hope changed, and our world changed with it.”

“Sometimes,” She says, “I think I would like to press a pause button on the world. Just shut it down, turn it off for a little while. Fishing used to do that, you could escape and do something that meant nothing. Do something time consuming and meaningless and just forget for a while. I miss that world.” 

She fusses with her own hands for a while, staring at them while you stare at her across the cold planks. Jeans and a V-neck shirt with a flannel on top. She is pristine from the front, but you can see the fire crawling at her edges, the smoke and fire that burnt her into a hollow shell, a paper mache person.

She turns her head toward the hole you bore into the ice, “You should check that, Rook, we can't put our life on hold forever.”

Turn your gaze to the boat slip and watch as the line goes taunt, as it snaps and pulls against the wooden support. Spring out of your nest of life preservers and go belly down on the wooden planks, stretch out alongside the pole with its fishing line and wrap your gloved hands around the thin plastic. Struggle to maintain your grip, in your thick nylon gloves, but be thankful all the same, for how they protect your hands as you wind the line around them, and struggle struggle struggle to pull the fish to the surface. 

You can see it's dark shape, large, and angry as it fights and pulls and dives as you heave and lift and finally, finally yank the Rainbow Trout out onto the ice.

It flops there, scales catching against the ice as you untangle your hands from the line and flex them, sore and shrieking even with the gloves padding. Pull your hands free of their coverings by clamping your fingers between your knees and pulling your arms up. Then reach for the fish, peel it off the ice where it has frozen and club it once against the side of the boat dock. Check that it’s eyes have gone glassy and pull the hook from its mouth, wiggle the bait to ensure its hold on the metal loop and drop it back into the water. 

Turn towards the fire, the fish held proudly in your hands as you smile and call for Mary May but...the shack is empty except for you and your fish.

—————

The Blizzard dies out on the fourth day, the whole world is quiet, but for the distant plops of snow falling off of high branches. It is warm in the way that it becomes midwinter, when the wind isn't howling, and the cloud covers rolls in and in comparison to what had come before your brain tricks itself into thinking, that yes, okay, you can venture out. It is warm enough for that.

It is warm enough and you are so damn tired of those three damn walls, of the wind that howls, and the distant glug of water pressing up against a thick layer of ice. You are tired of the way your stomach rebels at every move, at the headache that has settled firmly behind your eyes and won't be chased away with water, or food or time. Of the fatigue that grasped you hard and heavy on the second day of your snowbound incarceration. Of the redness that has crept into the thin skin of your hands, of the blue edges of your fingers. 

You know you cannot stay here any longer ,that your death is written on the peeling paint of the dock floorboards, and in the fishbones you had spat out onto the ice.

Check the arrows slung across your trash bag clad chest, and the fit of the nylon fishing pack across your hip, feel the hard shape of the peanut butter jar, and the soft slosh of your water bottle. 

Crawl over the pile of snow that gathered at the mouth of the shelter, sink deep into it, and flail your way out onto the lake and then to the lake shore and up into the treeline. Walk in the direction to your best approximation of the ranger station, with bow in hand. 

Get lost in the white frosted world.

—————

You bag a rabbit around the time you realize you have taken a wrong turn, realize that you have misremembered where the ranger station is in relation to the boat dock, and have now found yourself far off course and rather unsure as to where on Dutch’s Island you even are.

As far as consolation prizes go, the rabbit makes a poor one. The beast is skinny, white pelted, and died with an arrow that punched perfectly through its eye. 

You have not lost your skill at killing things, time and Joseph Seed have not stolen that part of you at least. Which when you think about it, it is even worse than the rabbit, as if killing things is all you were ever good for. 

“I didn't use to be like this.” You say to the air, confide to the trees. “I didn't want to be like this.”

“What did you want Baby?” Addie, that's Addie, her voice is coming from behind you, but when you turn you cannot see her. 

Shudder and shiver and pull your arms tight to your body, squeeze your eyes together and blink away the sun spots. 

“You wanted to play football, didn’t you?” Addie says, you can hear her voice coming from the wood in front of you, loud and clear and as pleasant as when she shot the shit with you over the radio. As she kept you entertained with jokes and stories, and lusty little quips as you trotted your way through the Henbane with her on overwatch in the Tulip. 

“I remember watching you on TV.” She says, and you take a step towards her, slow and ponderous as your struggle through the fresh, heavy snow. “Well I remember Hurk Jr, watching you on TV, but it was on, y’know, even though you went to one of those coastal schools. It was a bowl game, maybe, one of the holliday ones.” 

Take another step towards her and swallow against the nausea rising in your throat. “We played in the Rose Bowl my senior year. Fuck, but we had to fight hard to get there.”

“I always liked that parade,” Addie laughs to herself, “New Year's Day right? I’d sit there with my Bloody Mary, and nurse my hangover and watch all those floats stream by. It was nice, seeing all of those flowers in the middle of a Montana winter. Reminded me that this snow and ice bullshit wouldn't last forever.” 

Nausea is rising fast now, saliva flooding your tongue as you lean forward and vomit. Gag and brace yourself with your thighs against your forearms and spit until the acid has fled your mouth. Take a swig from your water bottle and swish it around your teeth.

“That was part of it too.” Addie laughed, she’s right behind you now, and her hand brushes against the nape of your neck, up into your hair, making your scalp tingle beneath the fleece lined beanie. “New Year’s Day was about keeping strong in the face of your regrets, and boy, after 20 years of marriage to that bastard Drubman did I have a lot of regrets.” 

“We just have to stay strong, Sweetheart.” She’s in front of you again, farther down the path. “But you can do that, right?”

Breath deep and nod once sharply. Take a step forward, and then another, chase your ghosts through the forest. Trust them in death as much as you did in life.

—————

Addie leaves you around the time you stumble upon the knocked down corpse of the Johnson Lookout Tour. It is a ruin of wooden planks and composite roof tiles and looks like a haunted, burned out beast in the fields of snow. You navigate around it, careful of the sheer, rocky drop off at its sides, and keep your eyes peeled for the storage bins you know sat snug under its wooden decks. A half circuit turns up no survivors, the bins too far buried under snow and fallen plank to be accessible, but as you turn to look out over the cliff side you catch sight of the lake and the boathouse down below. 

Swear to yourself as a flood of rage sweeps through your body, trailing heat down from your jaw to your chest. The fucking boat dock, how could you forget, you could see the tower from the boat dock, all you had to do was walk perpendicular to that cliffside, then follow that road across the island and the Ranger Station would be right THERE.

It would be right there. And you would be out of this damned cold.

Scream your rage out, roar into the empty wilderness, let your breath struggle through your cotton mask in a puff of cloudy white. Roar and roar until your throat goes sore and rough and your tone bear like. Stomp your way around the other side of the tower, barely caring to peer into the rubble for supplies until you have hit the compacted snow that hides the tarmac and start your slow descent down and around the rock faced cliff.

It’ll take you hours, take you the whole day, but you’ll get there, by the skin of your teeth if you have to. You’ll get there.

—————

The Ranger Station is mostly intact, once you stumble your way through the forest and find yourself on an overgrown, snow blocked road. The three buildings are still standing, the supply shack seemingly untouched but for the wear and tear of a county at war. Hints of posters still peak out from their walls, and you can see faded paint on the sides of the building where the Project’s Cross is wearing away in the sun. 

The outpost building itself is mostly unharmed, the walls at least, are still standing, but the windows are blown out, and glass crunches under your feet when you shove open the door. Snow and animal life have found their way insides. You see birds nests abandoned in the ceiling beams, a long dead racoon by the cast iron pot belly stove. 

The desks that fill the space are in a state of disarray, mussed with scattered papers, old coffee mugs, and animal droppings. A long range radio sits on a folding table in the backroom, its lights dead, and battery empty when you press your finger to the receiver. 

The back room at least is windowless, and built solidly, all tightly packed wooden planks and ancient metal office equipment. The door closes soundly when you shut it, and you can see yourself being able to hole up here better than the boat dock. 

The rabbit you had caught all those hours ago has gone frozen from where it hung by your side, but will be edible when applied to some heat, the stove out front will be useful for that, so long as you can find wood to feed it, or maybe a bag of lump charcoal that's been hidden about. But that is a task for another time.

Close the door behind you, and slide the bolt shut, sink down to your knees, exhausted and worn dry, flop against the cold linoleum tile, and blink there slowly as your body shivers, and your head splits and your stomach rebels.

The sickness that has been plaguing you since your dip in the frozen water of the bunker has been worsening with each passing day. It's not hypothermia, not really, not completely, but it is wearing on you, wearing you down. It sits heavily around your neck, noose-like and waiting. 

You have been free of the bunker for five days.

—————

The Ranger Station is better stocked than the boat dock, has piles of firewood in tall stacks against the back of the building,and a stand alone public restroom which you can salvage for planks, should your stockpile run out. The pot belly stove, it turns out, is connected to a pipe system that pumps warm air throughout the building, but even though you have gone and laboriously closed all the vents that open into the main room, the backroom never becomes hot enough for you to remove your layers, but at least is warmer than the dead space it had been before. Despite its failure as a heating system, the stove works perfectly to cook your rabbit and melt snow into water. It even heats up at least a 10 foot space around it before the open windows and lack of insulation steal that warmth away. 

The room itself is pretty picked over, after the war, and probably was sparsely stocked to begin with. You find no snacks hidden in desk drawers, just plenty to printer paper to sacrifice to the burning maw of your fire. 

You eat the rabbit and consider your slowly emptying jar of peanut butter and you know you’ll have to hunt something larger, or at least down more small game. 

But the day is ending, and fatigue is settling swiftly into your eyes and muscles, and you retreat to the back room with its solid four walls, and lay down for one long sleep.

—————

You head into the forest and you stay out there all day, chasing footprints through the snow and coming up short. The land around the island is silent but for the singular crunch of your own boots. You spend days orbiting the cabin, getting weaker and weaker as your food supply runs short and your attempts at hunting have been failures. Each step reveals a looseness to your limbs, a tremble to your knees and your hands that you cannot falsify as from the cold. Your stomach gnaws at you, rips into the core of you, and eats eats eats as the cold and the exercise eat eat eat . Seven days in and your circuit is hardly five miles from the Ranger Station, eight days and its less, ten days...and well…

Jess would be disappointed.

Jess _is_ disappointed. You see her form in the corner of your eyes, a blackened mass of smoke trapped under a waterproof hood. She stares at you and follows at your six, always silent, always waiting, always _there._

She looms after you, with bow in hand like a reaper, like a horseman of the apocalypse, she is Famine in death, where in life she did her best to teach you woodcraft, to keep you safe, to keep you fed.

She taught you to hunt, to track, to skin a kill in a way that left a pelt usable and not just slashed up skin. She taught you ways of survival that your own persistence, and murderous hands could never hope to grasp.

“I need your help.” you say to her specter, staring forward into the trees, as the presence of her sifts on the edge of your awareness, always playing in the corner of your eye. “Please Jess.” 

Of all your friends, she was the most mercurial, the most likely to leave your ass after taking down a cult outpost to chase down her own demons. You understood each other, understood that it wasn't personal, understood that Jacob had molded you both into top predators, who hated to share a kill. Teamwork of course is possible, cohabitation even more so, but you had your own agenda, your own needs, and often enough they didn't line up in ways that mattered, in ways that made sense to stick together as opposed to the benefits of traveling apart. But still...even then...over the long distance of the radio all you had to do was ask.

“You're wasting energy.” her voice cracked out, like logs popping on the fire, like a steamy hiss of geysers at the Mastodon GeothermalPark. “Find a hunting blind and wait there. Drop some bait and let the deer come to you.” 

“There are no deer. There is no bait.” You tell her, eyes forward, terrified that if you turn she will disappear just like the others. 

“There are always deer.” She growls. “There is always prey, nature will provide.”

A dark shape tucks itself by your shoulder, you can feel the skin of your back prickle in response. “I taught you too well to die out here --from this, from _starving to death_ like some sort of rhinestone cowboy. Be better, Rook.” 

Be better. She says, demands, insists. Be better, dont fail, dont fuck it up.

—————

You dont fuck it up.

You find a tree, with a blind that is mostly stable, and padded with snow and ice. You scrape some of the last of your peanut butter onto a palm sized piece of bark and you drop it in the clearing below and you scale the rickety ladder and you lay there on the snow covered platform. 

You lay there for hours, hand on your bow, fingers around your arrow, eyes slowly scanning and slowly blinking. 

A bird arrives first, a cardinal, a bright pop of red against the pure white background. It investigates the bit of bark for a few long minutes then flies away as quickly as it came. 

You wait longer and then longer still, until the sun has fallen in the sky and sits, neatly perched above the horizon. 

You wait into the dusk, when the forest is no longer long stretched shadows but _is_ shadow. You wait and wait and wait, until you hear the first distant crunch of foot, then another, and another. 

Push yourself to your knees, place your fingers on the bow and lean out over the edge of the blind. Squint into the falling darkness and search, until you see the heavy muscular body of a bighorn sheep. Its white rump shining like a beacon to your wandering eyes.

Wait as it draws near, until you can hear the puff of its heavy breaths, and you can see the flash of its oblong pupil. Draw your bow, and release. 

Catch it through the jugular. Watch it jump and stumble and twist as it falls to the ground. A mass of blood and a thrashing leg. 

Drag the beast home and hang it from the open wooden beams of the empty storage building. Slit it open from neck to tail. Drag out its entrails, let them slop into a plastic bucket and shove its contents towards the door, where the cold wind that seeps through will freeze it and keep it until you can turn it to bait. 

Slice at its skin until the carcass hangs bare, then carve away at the soft meat of its side. Slicing at the point on a steer that would make for a fifty dollar plate in a fine restaurant. Tuck the fillet into the torn plastic of your poncho and lock the ram inside your makeshift freezer then return to your base. 

Eat better than you have in years. 

—————

Spend a day cutting strips from the carcass and laying them out by the stove until they are perfectly pink and tender. Eat constantly, and greedily and fall asleep with a bursting stomach.

Head into the forest the next day, and the next, take your bucket of offal, and draw out the other hunters of the forest. 

Kill each beast with a perfectly placed arrow. Drag them back to your meat locker and cut strips from them too.

Hate, as you try to figure out how to cure that same meat into jerky, that you now know the taste of feral dog. 

—————

It has been thirteen days and you cannot help but wonder at how much food Joseph had squirreled away. Wonder if he hid some away in the event that you never came back, or let you out into the world with nothing more than a prayer to the god he so loved and a belief that you would return. 

Wonder how long it will take him to starve. 

You feel bad about it.

Almost.

Bad but not bad enough to drop one of your kills at his door like a pup looking for praise. 

Joseph isn't your master, after all.

—————

“You were such a good dog.” Jacob says when you kneel down to set some bait under a jury rigged snare. 

Snap to at the sound of his gravel rough voice, swing around, stumble over your footing in the snow and swing out with a knife in your hand. 

The blade passes through his body and he is on you.

_Fucking_

_on_

_You._

Has his hands around your throat, his weight on your body, pressing you down. Holding you down.

Thrash and shudder and scream as his voice slides into your ear, his breath cold against your skin. “That’s it. I’ve been waiting for this. Just calm down.”

Scream and shake and fight until you are vomiting in the snow, until you are wheezing and crying and the snow is torn asunder by your movement and the single trail of footsteps that led you there.

—————

Your strength has started to return but so has the nausea. The endless curdling in your stomach, the pressure behind your eyes. Each movement a misery, every blink a challenge to keep the bile in your stomach from staining your teeth. You are tired, you are feverish, you cannot remember how many lives you lived.

The crook of your elbow says fifty three, or at least it did, you think...say fifty three. The skin there is pink and blistered and peeling and the numbers you had cut into the skin are warped with it. 

“How long has it been?” You ask the empty air. 

Or well…

It was empty wasn't it?

Your ears are playing tricks on you. You can hear a distant strain of sound. A conglomeration of horns and strings and voices, all crooning crooning crooning 

_only you_

Your eyes go red, they have rolled up into your skull and you cannot force them back down

_can make all this world seem right_

lose hold of your breath, you cannot breathe, you cannot do anything

_only you_

loose track of your body, loose track of anything at all --

_can make the darkness bright_

as the seizure takes hold.

—————

Something is haunting these woods. 

Something else is here. Watching you. Waiting for you.

Someone is here. Hunting you.

You catch a flash of orange from the corner of your eyes when you step into the treeline. A startle of green amongst the snowbanks. Scar tissue and blue blue eyes.

You killed him. You killed him dead. He is dead. You know he’s dead. You killed him.

Jacob Seed walks after you, your own personal corpse. Laughing and cackling and whispering into your eardrums. 

_disappointing. do it again,_

_puppy_

_puppy_

_puppy_

_you like that, don't you?_

—————

You forgot about the bear.

You forgot about the bear. Forgot to look for its tracks, for its kills, for evidence that it was sharing the island with you.

You forgot about the bear with the wolf at your door and it kills you.

Kills you with a swipe of its heavy, clawed paw, just as easy as those paws had killed numerous Peggies scant years ago.

Kills you, and eats you, while your arrows stick out of its hide and your mouth gasps out the same word again and again and again.

“Cheeseburger,” you try to say, would have said, had said, as the starved grizzly broke from the treeline and ripped you to pieces.

—————

  
  


The forest isn't safe. The forest hadn't been safe for a long time. It just took you too long to notice it.

—————

Wake up in a clearing comprised of churned snow and a frozen lake of your own blood. Feel the icy air as it presses into your cold skin, as it breaks past the clothing torn asunder and settles into the crusted blood that covers your torso from pelvis to jugular. Struggle for a moment to convince your lungs to move, to draw in air burning with cold and fucking breathe.

Gasp your first breath and feel the weakness in your lungs, in the muscles of your abdomen as they shift and struggle and cry out with each movement. Your core feels like jello, like a child’s, a baby’s, all strength gone, just soft and newformed flesh. Press your hands to the space and feel the skin there, hairless, freezer cold, and rough with scabbed blood. Roll to your front, shift your knees under you, and press up, until you can stumble to your feet, your legs scrambling to keep underneath you as you trip over the ice capped snow. 

Return to the ranger station a dead man, a white walker, all frozen flesh and shadowed blood.

—————

You have a single arrow left. The others lost or snapped or simply gone after your encounter with Chees--the bea-- the grizzly. You have a single arrow and blue tinged skin, and a world that is no longer forgiving.

Hide out in the back room of the rangers station for an hour, and then two and then the whole day. Curl up there, by the vent, where the pot bellied stove pushes fourth lukewarm air and tries to thaw the death chill from your skin. Wonder if your dermis has always been that particular color of blue tinged pale, or if it is just your body struggling through exsanguination that makes you that color. 

Your torso feels raw when you move, your muscles screaming like you had done ten thousand crunches and then gone a round in the boxing ring. 

Your guts are rebelling, growing and groaning and screaming with sickness in turn. You are hungry, you are nauseous, you want to puke and piss and shit in tandem. You want to do anything to escape the endless torment your newest resurrection has left you in.

That your bear left you in. 

How could he? A quiet part of your mind cries, he loved me, he's mine, betrayed, betrayed! But he hadn't been yours, not really, not ever. How could a man hope to tame a bear, to turn a grizzly into a war machine and escape the bloody consequences? To expect that three years and a starved land would lead to anything but decimation.

But his eyes, they were so...and he was so…

Monstrous.

—————

“You're not looking too good there, Rook.”

Whitehorse is sitting in the old office chair by the desk, one foot planted on the ground, the other tucked over his knee as he twists slowly back and forth. He’s looking down at you, all solemn eyed and drooping mustache, just like he had anytime a particular shift had been bad. 

“You tried cleaning yourself up? You’ll feel better.” He stops his slow twist and brings his suspended foot to rest on the ground. He leans forward, hands clasped between his spread legs and tries to catch your eye. “You’re looking real bad. I don't think this is working out.”

“What's not working out, Boss?” You can help the bitter laugh that rises in your throat and sets your torso on fire with each jerk of your diaphragm. “Me? Living?”

“You being here.” Earl says. “It’s dangerous. Up here, alone. What if the bear…”

Squeeze your eyes back and draw a harsh hand across the skin. “I”m not going back there. I can’t- _I won’t_.”

“But Rook,” The Sheriff says,” You have to. You can't die here, son.”

You cannot help the laughter that pours from your lips nor the tears that fall from our eyes. “I can't seem to die anywhere, Boss. I can't seem to die at all.”

He reaches for you, hand hovering over your shoulder. Raise your arm to complete the circuit and watch Earl disappear as your arm passses through his palm. Cry harder in his absence.

————— 

You have not slept for three days. You have not moved for even longer. How could you when Jacob Seed watches you from the far corner of the room. He never moves from his corner, never blinks, never takes his eyes off your form just like you never take yours off of his. 

He talks sometimes, rasping voice preaching about weakness and strength, and survivors and culling the lowing beasts of the earth. He speaks of life and death and sometimes he lets you sit in silence, just stares at you across the three feet of cold concrete. Sometimes he hums. Hums the song from your time in _the room_. The one that makes your limbs turn to jello, your nerves to silly string. That knocks you flat like a punch to the face. 

Those moments are the worst of them. When he hums and stares and stands three feet apart but you can still feel his hands wandering across your skin. Under your clothes, unwanted, unasked for, unstoppable. 

Watch him until you pass out from exhaustion. Wake up to an empty room, dark and quiet solitude.

Force yourself onto trembling feet, pull your bow over your shoulder, thread the lone remaining arrow through your sleeve so that the shaft presses into the meat of your arm and the broadhead pokes an inch out of the cuff. 

Walk past the long dead coals in the pot belly stove. Past the shattered windows and the busted in door. Walk across the yard with its coating of fresh snow, and the starlight reflected on its white face. Jimmy open the door to the storage shed. Pull the gnawed upon frozen carcass of the ram across your shoulders, wrap a shaking hand around the hind paw of another dead beast and walk.

Walk for miles, for hours, walk for so long that the sun breaks across the horizon and sets the snow to sparkling, blinding light.

Walk back to the bunker.

Stand outside its metal door and knock.

—————

The Joseph who answers your call is not the same man who forced you into the wasteland. He is smaller for one, worn away by time and starvation, he is a man marked by loneliness and fear and desperation. 

Desperation that makes him impatient, that makes him approach you before you have fully closed the heavy blast door, before you have shoved the ram from your shoulders. He reaches for you, just as you have seen him reach for his brothers. 

His arms slither around your neck, move to cradle your skull and tilt your head forward, until your forehead is pressed against his and you can share the oxygen in your lungs. His eyes drift closed and his hand flexes against your neck, clutching, checking, demanding. 

It feels…

It feels real. Real in a way that the touches of your friends didn,t when you were in the wasteland. You can feel the heat of his palm as it presses against the tatters of your hair. His thumb as it brushes the shell of your ear. The hot oiliness of his forehead against yours. 

You cannot help the sigh that passes from your lips, the ease in tenseness of your spine, the remaining nausea in your stomach. 

“I didn't think you were coming back.” Joseph murmurs, and then finally pulls away, his hands resting on your shoulders, a solid weight, before sliding down the lank forms of your arms to take a better look at the obliteration of your clothing. 

“Now I think…” He murmurs, “it was a miracle you came back at all.” 

Step by him and shove the ram carcass from your shoulders, kick a foot at the furred form of the dog. “I wasn't the only hunter up there.” You finally say, when the warmth of his skin against yours had faded away.

Joseph perks up at your words, eyes bright and sharp. “There were other people? Survivors?”

Shake your head and pull the shredded trash bag poncho over your head and shove it into the far corner of the room, the one that would come to hold all of your irradiated clothing. 

Bare yourself to the room, to yourself and Joseph and his God, show him the burned skin, the radiation blisters, the new formed scars, the skin of your torso that is pale and new and babysoft. Step under the spray of the emergency showerhead and rinse radiation from your skin, stay there until the water has grown hot then lukewarm and then cold. Try to chase the blue edges from your tingling limbs, as you drown yourself in water.

—————

Bundle yourself in soft sweats, and an old tshirt, walk past Joseph as he sizzles meat in the kitchen, fall face first onto the worn couch in the darkened room with the dead aquarium. Lay there in the darkness, trailing snow numbed fingers across the rough skin of your arms. Over the deep keloid scars around your wrists, the rough burns and blisters newly acquired, to the tally marks in the crook of your elbow. Count yourself to sleep with them and wonder when they’ll stop.

—————

The nausea hasn't left, nor the headache, or the endless fatigue. The Father is worried for you, as he has long been worried for you. It starts with a blanket drawn over your sleeping form, progresses to plates with delicate slices of meat he presses to your lips, to water dosed with iodine. 

“I’m sorry,” He tells you the first time your water is rancid with the metallic tang. “We have no radiation treatments.” The chuckle that passes his lips is bitter. “My Sibling’s Gates were filled with them, ThyroShield, Lostat, DTPA… if you just listened, if you heard my call you would not be in this situation, Lazarus. I would not have had to send you into the burning fields, into the arms of death itself.”

His thumb brushed against your cheekbone, his ragged nail caching the skin under your eye.

“The iodine water will help, my child, Jacob always said it would do in a pinch.” 

Swallow it down and try not to vomit. Try not to flinch as he uses the same mixture to wipe down the burns and blisters on your limbs, the ragged skin of your lips.

His eyes catch yours and hold your gaze until you shudder and break, twisting your own eyes down and to the floor. 

With a sigh he presses one last hand to your shoulder and makes for the door. He cannot see your mouth stall over the words, “Thank you.”

—————

You get better, slowly, over the course of two weeks. You get better, get stronger, healthier, your skin healthy, your limbs pink, the blisters and burns gone but for a scattering of pale scar tissue, like salt spray across your form. 

And it is then that you realize that a lot has changed between you and the Father, from when he had first sent you out into the wasteland, and the countless days in which you decided not to return.

He is careful around you in a way he had never been before. Not out of fear, no. You know that look on his face all too well, but out of...respect, maybe. A realization that in this moment, you have power over him, hold his well being in your hands. 

You have become the sole provider, and he is bound to you. 

—————

The food runs out so quickly.

Three short weeks after your foray topside Joseph sits across from you at the kitchen table and sets a watery bowl of bone broth before you.

“You’ll have to go out again.” He says as he regards the pale liquid in his own bowl. 

He says it like a fact, like one of the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not cower in thine shelter, thou will go out. 

Stare at him across the kitchen table and wonder when he gained this power over you, when he would demand and you would listen. 

—————

You step into the wasteland a second time, bow in hand and a single arrow to your name. For all the time you have been locked in the bunker, very little has changed topside, there is snow and ice and cold and an endless silence to the air. 

Walk down the path, past the truck with its mausoleum of bodies, and do not stop to grieve them. Skirt around the edges of the forest, and the endless deaths that hide amongst its boughs. Stick to the path and fight the flinches that over take you at every hint of red, and green, and brown. 

—————

The boathouse is much as you left it, snowed in and empty. The hole you had cut into the ice had long frozen over, forever trapping your fishing line and sinker in its icy grasp. 

You box up the rest of the fishing tackle, pulling nylon straps from the life vests to tie it across your body, your own little plastic backpack. 

You leave the dock soon after, picking your way across the shoreline, eyes flashing between the frozen lake and the encroaching trees to your right. 

The world is quiet but for the crush of your own boots against frozen muck, and the soft plops of over warm snow falling from branches to the ground below. 

You have been walking for an hour when you see it.

A deer.

Drinking at the lake’s edge.

At first you nearly miss it, the beast’s pelt the palest of browns, nearly white, your eyes sliding over their form, snow tired and blind with it, until the doe twitches, head raising, and peeking over its shoulder. Not at you, fortunately, but at some sound within the forest at her back. 

The moment of fright passes and the deer drops her head back to the water, and you sneak closer, placing an arrow to your bow string and drawing back. 

Your arrow flies, just as you and the deer hear the gunshot. 

Her head springs up and her body lunges forward in a stutter step that buries the broad head deep into the meat of her shoulder instead of neatly through her neck.

She bursts forward across the frozen lake, and you give chase, hand pulling loose the knife sheathed at your side. 

You follow her and the blood trail halfway across the frozen water, your boots ringing thick and hollow thumps with each step. 

You put the creature out of its misery, and then, only then, do you turn your gaze to the south west, to Holland Valley, where that distant gunshot still rings. 

—————

You don't bother dressing the deer. Just pull the arrow from its shoulder then sling it over yours. The carcass is heavy and weighty in a way you have grown unused to. Has substance in a world of famine and the weight of endless hours. 

You cannot help but stand there, on the ice for endless minutes, the body of the deer warming your neck, waiting and listening for another shot to ring out, to cascade amongst the mountains, to echo in your ears.

For a long time, the world remains silent.

—————

You return to the bunker. To Joseph and his waiting arms. He presses his forehead to yours when you step damp out of the shower. Presses a kiss to your temple while his hands weigh your shoulders down, the two points of pressure, heavier even, than the deer. 

The weight of his presence suffocates you. Keeps the knowledge of what you heard pressed tight between your lips even as it is the only thought being processed by your brain.

—————

Joseph likes your hair. Likes it now that it's grown long and shaggy and brushes against your shoulders in a curtain of grey. Has taken to carding his fingers though the growth, to twisting the thick strands between his fingers or brushing it up into buns and or ponytails so when paired with your lengthening beard you look more like a Seed than a Rook. 

He has gotten handsy with you in the same way he and his brothers were always handsy. Like you were theirs to be touched, or beaten, or taken. He finds you in the quiet moments, when you lay out on the couch in the room with the aquarium with an old book in hand and runs his hands through your hair and you hate that you don't hate it.

Hate that the brush of his fingers across your scalp loosens a growing tightness in your skin. Eases a tension in the muscles of your neck and down your shoulders you didn't realize you even carried. Hate that he seems to be getting just as much relief from the contact that you do. 

It is two days after your foray into the wasteland and five minutes past his daily sermon, when Joseph has walked up to the couch and sits down by your hip without so much as a by-your-leave that you confront him. Test him, because you are bored and because you can.

“Are you feeling lonely, Seed?” You ask without raising your eyes from the black lines of your book, “Your Faithful unfulfilling?”

You can feel his hand where it hovers over your hip, that heated space in the scant inch between your body and his. 

“Never unfulfilling.” He says, and he finally brings his hand down and lets it rest gently against the narrow space of your stomach. “But they are very far away. Like angels. They speak to me but I cannot touch them, cannot feel them. Their presence is heard but I admit I find myself at a loss without my brothers and my sister at my side.”

“So you’ve come to bother me instead?” The words at this point are rote. They hardly carry the vim and vigor and pure unadulterated hatred that they would have a short month ago. 

“A man is not an island.” Joseph says, “Humans are social beings, we need community, crave it even. I know this isolation has been wearing you down, just as it has me. We continue on in this way, and neither of us will be walking the lands of New Eden in any state to be called living.”

You close the book gently, setting the worn paper back on the table before you “So what are you proposing them? Sanctioned snuggle time? A bit of heavy petting?” Your mind is whirling, an idea sparking to life in the deep recesses of your brain. You’ll have to play this just right, you’ll have too—“I’ve lasted this long without you, Seed, and I can last another three years just as easy.” Push a little bit of petulance into your tone and wait.

“Physically maybe. But mentally? Lazarus, you are hardly the paradigm of mental stability as it is, do you really want to see how bad you will be after another four years of isolation?”

His hand is making long strokes down your back, your nerves tingling in the wake of his movement. Your eyes start to shutter, easing down as your body eases under the weight of his hand. It is not something you can fight, an automatic response strengthened by time and solitude.

“What do you want, Joe?” You breathe out, one long exhale.

“I want to come to an understanding.”

His hand has moved up to your neck, brushing through the locks at the base of your skull. His pupils dilate and you know you have him. 

Take his hand in yours, tug him down so that he can slot in front of you on the couch, so that you can press your face against his shoulder, and hide your eyes as your hands stroke down the cotton swathed expanse of his torso. So that you can touch and pet and cuddle and lure him in. Lure him in, get him used to your hands on his body, and ease him into the bliss of human contact, so that when your hand drifts towards his pocket, and comes up one key richer he thinks nothing of it. For a long, long hour, Joseph thinks of nothing more than your shared space, and the weight of your hands against his skin.

—————

With the key, it is easy to open the door to the radio room when Joseph is safely asleep and the hours have crept so late into the night it has become the next day.

You leave the lights off, but use your lighter to cast away the darkness. The room is hollow without Dutch in it, bare of its map of the valley, of the spaghetti string yarn that tracked Peggie troop movements, the pins and needles that tacked photos to paper print outs and hastily scrawled notes. 

Now there is just a cross, an Eden’s Gate cross, brushed across the wall in rusty brown. You know what was used to paint it, had broken open enough wounds that you mights as well have prepared the pallet. 

At its base, sits the radio. Silent, waiting, single light blinking slowly, your own lighthouse beacon.

Take a seat in the chair before the table, slide the wide rounded ears of the headphones into place and flick the power switch.

The world erupts into static and you have never heard anything sound so alive. 

It buzzes along your spine, takes the measure of your bones, your nerves, the meat at the very core of you. The receiver is set to station 12.2, the Peggie’s general broadband channel. 

You reach for the knob and twist it slowly, listening carefully for the hint of a word, the pause of a breath, but come up empty until the dial hits station 6.5, used for General Reports and harmless check ins for the Resistance. 

Your hands are shaking, sweat has crawled into your hairline, drips its nauseating way down your spine. 

“T-This is” you stutter, you swallow, you try again, “This is Deputy Rook. Can you hear me? Is anyone there?” 

You wait. You repeat yourself. You wait again. 

You change the channel.

You cry your name over broadband, over the airwaves, into the void.

At channel 10.8, the Rye’s, you are numb. Your lips can’t even form the shape of your own name, you simply wheeze, “Nick, are you alive?”

“I told you.” Says a voice.

Says _the_ voice. “That there is no one on that radio but the Faithful.”

You are not ready for the heavy blow against the back of your head. You are not ready for anything at all.

—————

The blood pumping in your ears turns your skull into a hollow ocean, your eyes once they open are drowning.

Fingers under your chin tilt your head up and back, and the sudden motion of it makes you nauseous. Sets you gagging and gasping even as the hand tightens against your chin and the motion is arrested in a harsh jerk.

Blue eyes catch your own, and they are wild and vicious and furious in a way you have not seen since you stepped foot on the step of the church on the day that the bombs fell. 

“I thought we had an understanding.” Joseph says and his voice is hard and sharp and nothing like the gentle tones you had gotten so used to. “I thought you understood your place in this world, in my New Eden.” He snarls, and his thumbnail is cutting into the skin of your chin and the sharp pain of it brings the world into clarity.

You are in the kitchen, back against the cabinetry under the sink, hands bound tight behind you, so tight, you can barely feel your fingers against the bloodless pins and needles. 

“I thought you knew your place! That you had shoved away the disease and filth of your old life! You were Lazarus reborn, God had given—”

“The only filth and disease is you, Seed!” You snarl, “You murderer, you fucking cultist! How much blood is on your hands-!”

“Blood!” He barks over your words, “You want to talk about blood? About murder? 

“This isn’t about me!” You kick out at him and your leg goes wild. “This is about you, you and your fucking bullshit! You don't own me, Joseph, you don't control me! You think you’d still be alive if it weren’t for me!? If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been feeding you these past few months. I can leave you! I can leave any time I damn well please! You’d be stuck here forever. Until you fucking starved to death or took a chance in the wasteland and fucking died there instead. My leaving you would be a service to the world!”

You see the punch before it lands, but can't move far enough to dodge it, Joseph’s bony knuckles crack against your lips and your head crashes back against the cabinetry and for endless moments your vision is black, your limbs sluggish.

“I didn't want it to come to this.” Joseph says, and he sounds so far away, but the world is tilting and you cannot trust your own senses. “You gave me no choice.” 

His voice gains that nerve wrecking cadence, the one he uses when he delivers his sermons and when he reads from his own Book.

_“And among all parts of the body, the tongue is a flame of fire. It is a whole world of wickedness, corrupting your entire body. It can set your whole life on fire, for it is set on fire by hell itself.”_

A foot finds its way under your ribs, and you are kicked over onto your back, Joseph's hand returns to your chin, his thumb shoving into the corner of your mouth, behind your teeth and struggle though you might, you cannot force your jaw shut. Cannot tear away as he brings a knife burning orange towards your face, slots it between your teeth and presses it against the meat of your tongue. 

—————

Joseph has regrets as soon as you stop screaming. He is contrite, and remorseful, and his hands flutter like birds as they reach for you. 

Strike away his touch, and push away the sound of his words, your tongue heavy and swollen in your mouth.

Whether there are others alive in the wasteland above ground is as meaningless as your resistance, but topside is the only space you can be where Joseph is not.

Leave the bunker with your bow and a single arrow. Step into the thawing wasteland and walk down the mud slick paths, walk and walk until you hit the north most point of the island, sink to your knees and ease your knife from its sheath. Pray to the god you don’t believe in that this death will make you reset. That this death will offer you the chance of redemption, of choice and possibility. 

You should have known better.

You should have known that whatever favor you had was lost when the bombs fell. You should have known that what came after was hell. 

Your death has healed you, oh Lazarus, it has healed you all wrong. Blistered flesh, and thick scar tissue, radiation burns and gunshot wounds, a dance of keloid across your skin, like sparks flying off a fire. Your body is a road map of your own failure and you cannot hide that beneath lies.

The lies you tell yourself to keep sane, to keep moving, to make it all seem like it had a point. The hardest lies though, are the ones that contain the truth. 

You hate him.

You love him.

You cannot stand the sight of him, but cannot fathom leaving him behind. 

You are Joseph's, you are Joseph's and he is yours. Yours to love and to hate, forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to all of you dear readers who have made it this far. I know the subject matter of this fic was rough, long, and dark. It will all pay off in the end. I promise this. Forged, the third and final installment of the ‘Shadow in the Valley’ Series should be posted within the next few months. I just need some time to get myself together (and to review the source material) before I start the next installment.  
> The biggest of thanks to Liliandoh and Ealasaid for all their suggestions and help editing. You mean the world to me, my darlings.
> 
> Please drop me a comment, It really helps me out to know which parts of the story you enjoyed/hated/despaired over. I want to be able to produce the best content for you all, and feedback is always appreciated. 
> 
> Be well & have the best week~


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